


Gossamer

by leonidaslion



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Fae & Fairies, M/M, Wincest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-10
Updated: 2011-04-10
Packaged: 2017-10-17 22:12:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 30
Words: 34,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/181770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leonidaslion/pseuds/leonidaslion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Come away, o human child! To the waters and the wild with a faery hand in hand, for the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dark

**Author's Note:**

> Chronological Order:
> 
> [Memory](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267337) | [Spirit](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267330) | [Breath](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267356) | [Tears](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267329) | [Light](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267334) | [Blood](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267342) | [Wind](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267335) | [Thirst](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267343) | [Stars](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267338) | [Yearn](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267350) | [Earth](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267339) | [Dirt](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267349) | [Listen](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267327) | [Smell](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267324) | [Air](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267345) | [Shadow](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267333) | [Moon](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267328) | [Dust](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267340) | [Hunger](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267332) | [Dark](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267322) | [Sweat](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267346) | [Dream](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267336) | [Touch](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267325) | [Sound](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267347) | [Water](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267352) | [Speak](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267354) | [Sight](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267341) | [Taste](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267331) | [Fire](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267353) | [Sun](http://archiveofourown.org/works/181770/chapters/267355)
> 
> [Art](http://maichan808.livejournal.com/50737.html) by maichan808

Dean doesn’t take the news well.

Sam’s learning to read his brother again—all the old cues gone but new ones freshly risen in their place. Dean’s eyes don’t give anything away anymore. His face is a beautiful, still cipher. But his wings droop when Bobby makes the announcement. The vivid blue color dulls.

“I know a doctor,” Bobby offers, faltering in the face of Dean’s apparent apathy.

Dean shrugs with a half-hearted flutter of wings and doesn’t say anything.

The doctor is fascinated. Sam almost slugs him several times, when the man has his hands on Dean’s wings or back and gets an avid, wondering look on his face. The charm the doctor’s wearing around his neck is protecting him from whatever fae aphrodisiac Dean gives off, but it apparently doesn’t protect against a more scientific enchantment with Dean’s body because the doctor’s eyes are ravenous.

And he doesn’t look sad at all when he says he can’t do anything for them: too many blood vessels, too much uncertainty as to how the new muscles in Dean’s back would react to that kind of trauma.

Dean doesn’t look surprised.

Sam drops his brother off at the motel and then heads out for dinner, making sure to pick up some more sugar at a local convenience store. Dean still can’t handle solid food, and his body clearly prefers sex as a nutrient, but they’ve discovered that sugar-water makes a decent substitute and Dean has been guzzling it by the gallon-full. It’s the only thing they go through faster than salt, these days.

It’s dark in the room when Sam returns. All the curtains are drawn as usual, but the lights are also out and no amount of flicking the switch turns them on. When Sam feels for the bulb on the lamp nearest the door and finds the jagged shards with his fingertips, he jerks his hand back and swears beneath his breath.

“Careful,” Dean says from the direction of the beds. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

“What happened?” Sam asks, although it’s already pretty clear to him.

“I broke them,” Dean answers matter-of-factly. “You bring more bulbs in here and I’ll do the same.”

Sam hesitates—he doesn’t know how to handle Dean these days—and then fumbles, “Are you—do you want to—”

“No. I don’t want to talk. I want you to leave me the fuck alone.” Dean’s voice cracks in the darkness, and Sam wonders wistfully if there’s an expression on his brother’s face now, now that he knows he can’t be seen.

And then Dean says it.

“Why the fuck didn’t you just leave me there? At least then I wouldn’t have known I was a freak.”

“You’re not a freak.”

“Oh yeah, cause there’re tons of dudes running around with motherfucking _butterfly_ wings.”

There’s a slur to Dean’s voice beneath the bitterness and Sam’s brow furrows. Putting the bags down on the floor, he feels his way forward until his fingertips brush Dean’s bare skin. He expects Dean to pull away, but he doesn’t. He just stands there swaying slightly.

“Are you _drunk_?” Sam demands.

“No,” Dean answers with an unsteady laugh. “I’m fuckin’ plastered.”

Sam gets a better grip on his brother and eases him down onto one of the beds, careful of the fragile wings he knows are spread out behind him. “Thought you couldn’t drink anymore.”

“Can’t drink liquor. Never said I couldn’t get drunk.”

“Well then what—”

Sam can’t get the rest of the question out past Dean’s mouth, which is pressed suddenly against his, or around Dean’s tongue, which is sliding past his lips. But he tastes the answer in the kiss, tastes the lingering remnants of honey, and how fucked up is it that Dean gets buzzed from something that comes in bear-shaped plastic bottles?

Jerking his head to the side, he manages to get free long enough to say, “Even if you can’t—if they’re permanent. It doesn’t change who you are, Dean.”

Dean doesn’t respond to that—he doesn’t even bother laughing at the blatant lie. He just kisses Sam again, and pulls him into the bed, and they fuck like that, with the dark pressing around them and hiding the truth. Hiding the wings and the deeper, stranger changes Sam has noticed in his brother since their return from Faerie.

In the dark, he can almost believe it’s his brother in his arms, instead of some fae halfbreed nourished by sex and sugar water and far too lovely and precious to be real.

In the dark, he can almost let himself believe that Dean loves him back.


	2. Smell

It’s autumn court. Dean knows from the brilliant fire of the leaves festooning the great hall, and from the harvest crown tangled in Keelan’s hair. Dean helped Keelan make the crown in the twilight, eating more berries than went in amidst the beech and maple leaves and twisting sprigs of wood, and reveling in the casual touch of his lord’s hands on his skin. There are birch armbands on both of Keelan’s arms, trimmed with gold, and when the moon has set fully and the crowd of guests has drunk and danced their full, there will be a hunt.

The thought of it makes Dean shiver a little in anticipation, and Keelan feels the slight movement through the web-fine, starlit chain linking them and turns toward him with a soft smile. He uses his hand on the chain to draw Dean even closer and then offers a fond caress along his jaw.

“Nervous, love?” he asks.

“No,” Dean answers honestly.

He’s done this before, after all, several times, and Keelan has explained how important it is. The symbolic stalk and chase. The capture. The hours of frenzied, animalistic pleasure beneath the full moon while Keelan’s court looks on and bears witness.

“Good,” Keelan praises, moving even closer and scenting Dean’s skin while resting graceful hands at Dean’s waist. “I hate chasing you, Uaithne,” he whispers. “I want always to have you within reach, always beneath my fingertips.”

His nose brushes Dean’s skin and Dean shivers as the contact runs through his body and heats his aching loins. His wings give a tiny shiver.

“But I love catching you,” Keelan adds, playful heat filling his voice. “I will make you moan tonight, love—loud enough to shame even the watching moon.”

Dean wants that. He wants it now and not later, wants all the running through the gardens and woods done with so that Keelan can bring him down and tumble him in the grass. He wants to look up and find his wild autumn lord looking down at him.

Instead, there’s a commotion over by the door to the hall and Keelan pulls away. He doesn’t move far, and he doesn’t drop the short, shining leash attached to the collar around Dean’s neck, but Dean still feels cold and neglected at the loss. He moves after his lord on his own, seeking out the heat of Keelan’s body while watching the commotion come closer with curious eyes.

It’s a man, taller than anyone else here except for Keelan. Shaggy brown hair, slanting eyes, muscular body. He’s striding forward as though he is lord here, although Dean thinks he presents a funny picture, with his clothing _(dirty and coarse-looking)_ on inside out. He’s carrying a knife in one hand, and there’s another weapon strapped to his back—something long and blunt that Dean doesn’t have a name for. Whatever it is, it’s unsettling, and Dean wants to be away from the man just as much as the rest of Keelan’s court, which is clearing away from him with frightened, shocked murmuring.

“Stranger,” Keelan says in a rolling, commanding voice, “You come unlooked for and uninvited to this fete, bringing weapons hostile to this assembly. State your name and lineage, that we may judge the penalty of your transgression.”

The stranger’s mouth twists and he reaches into a pocket—Dean thinks for another weapon, perhaps, but the man only tosses two emeralds onto the floor at Keelan’s feet.

Keelan is still for a moment—long enough for Dean to understand that he’s been unpleasantly surprised—and then he says, “I would never be judged an unfair lord. Ask a better price if you will, and I will see it paid. His weight in emeralds, perhaps? A beam of the sun? The power to ride the wind?”

“You can’t fucking _buy_ him,” the stranger spits, practically vibrating with rage. “I don’t give a shit what you’re offering. Just give him back.”

“Regretfully, I must decline.”

“Give me back my brother or I swear to God I will cut through every one of you sons of bitches.” The stranger moves, thrusting the knife into a sheath at his hip and grabbing the other, odd weapon, which makes a mechanical noise as the stranger grips it and points it at Keelan. Dean edges to one side, out from behind his lord, trying to get a better look, and the stranger’s eyes snap to him and go instantly, unsettlingly dark.

“Dean,” he breathes, and the sound of his secret, unspoken name makes Dean cringe inside and duck back against Keelan where it’s safe. He presses close, taking comfort in the arm Keelan reaches around his waist. Keelan’s other hand comes up and strokes at Dean’s hair, reassuring and loving.

All around them, silence lies thick in the hall.

Then, in a harsh, furious voice, the stranger whispers, “What did you do to him?”

“He’s mine,” Keelan answers lightly. “The mortal you came here for is gone, as you can see. Take the compensation I offer and leave.”

“Dean!” the stranger calls. “Dean, get out of the way so I can shoot the fucker!”

Dean can’t stand the way his name presses against him when it’s spoken aloud like that, and pushes even more firmly against his lord. Keelan will protect him.

“His name is Uaithne,” Keelan corrects, still with the same soothing voice and hands on Dean’s body. “He is my chosen consort and well-cherished. What can you offer him, mortal, but filth and degradation and decay?”

“How about free will?” the stranger shoots back, and Dean isn’t sure what that is, but it sounds terrifying. He doesn’t recognize the strange, violent man, but he’s bright enough to understand that this argument is about him. He knows that the stranger wants to take him away, and if he weren’t too terrified to make his legs work, he’d drop to his knees and beg Keelan not to let it happen.

But then Keelan chuckles and bumps Dean’s chin with his knuckles. Dean lifts his gaze at the gesture, and the light in Keelan’s eyes reassures him enough to offer a tentative smile.

“We run for the harvest moon tonight,” Keelan says, clearly speaking for the stranger but still worshipping Dean with his eyes. “Uaithne runs the part of the hare and hind, the swiftest and most elusive I have seen. He is taken by his own choosing, no other’s.”

Dean flushes a little at the praise.

“Catch him, mortal, and I swear I will not raise hand against you,” Keelan offers, and his eyes finally shift away from Dean’s.

“I have a better idea,” the stranger replies. “I kill all of you and take him home anyway.”

But Keelan laughs, bright like a bell, and there’s a sound like sand pattering onto stone. Dean chances a look around and that’s exactly what it is: the strange object in the man’s hand running out of his fingers in a dry, black rain while he stares at it in dismay. When he reached for the knife at his side, there’s a similar, dusty fall there.

“This is Faerie, mortal,” Keelan says, amused. “Iron withers and falls to dust if kept too long, didn’t you know?” He gives a tiny tug on the chain and Dean comes obediently, tipping his face up and opening his mouth for his lord’s kiss. The mortal makes a sound, but Keelan is kissing Dean and it’s easy to ignore it.

After, he folds himself against his lord again, feeling content and settled—Keelan won’t let anything happen to him, of course he won’t—and glances over at the stranger. The man has an odd, confusing expression on his face, both furious and sad.

“I’m going to kill you,” he says, shifting his gaze from Dean to Keelan.

“So ungrateful,” Keelan muses. “I offer you a chance to reclaim what you have lost and you wish to trade idle barbs? The night is wasting, mortal. Make your choice. Join the hunt or go home.”

The stranger’s eyes go flinty and hard. His jaw firms.

Keelan nods. “The hunt, then. Best huntsman to claim the prize.” He kisses Dean’s temple, chastely, and then unhitches chain from the collar around his neck. “Run, love,” he murmurs with a caress of Dean’s bare hipbone, and Dean feels the need take him, same as it always does on this wild night. The need to run, and run, and run, and let no one catch him until his huntsman comes.

He’s off without a second thought, sprinting through the crowd and out a side door into the night. The hounds leap around him as he leaves the courtyard for the garden, but they fall behind quickly and then there’s just the moon overhead and the air caressing his skin.

It seems like hours and moments when he catches the first, faint snaps of movement around him—Keelan’s court out in search of him, of a taste. Evading them is child’s play, and Dean darts in and out of hunting groups, searching for his lord, for the one he wants. Soon there will be savoring, and the rush of pleasure, and Dean will be able to forget all about the unsettling stranger, whom Keelan will undoubtedly send away.

And then ... then Dean catches scent of something and his steps falter. It isn’t a familiar smell, precisely. But then again, it isn’t an unfamiliar one, either. It smells the way his dreams do sometimes, when he wakes with his pillow wet with tears and no thoughts in his head. It’s the scent, he thinks, of memory.

Dean falters and then slows and then, hesitantly, creeps toward a dark row of cypress. He keeps his wings straight behind him, so they won’t get torn on the branches, and peers into the dark places, hidden from the moon by the trees.

That scent. That hollowing, haunting scent.

“Dean,” the stranger’s voice breathes, and a rough hand grabs him around the waist and jerks him into a hug, and Dean is fighting to get away—no, this isn’t right, no one’s supposed to touch him but Keelan—but the night is fading around him, dissolving in fits and starts, and suddenly there are a stranger’s thoughts and feelings and memories bleeding into his mind, and it hurts, and Dean cries out in wordless protest but Sam _(Sam his brother Sammy)_ holds him tighter and refuses to let go.

 _Keelan,_ Dean thinks in a final, desperate plea.

But then Sam’s hand comes up, grips the collar around Dean’s neck, and yanks, sending wind spinning off into the dark and stars tumbling out onto the grass, and they fall through the spaces between into reality.


	3. Touch

Sam won’t, at first.

Dean is sure it’s revulsion—he doesn’t blame his brother, he’d rip them out himself if he could reach, and fuck what that handsy doctor said—and the way he keeps catching Sam staring doesn’t do anything to change his opinion on the matter.

It isn’t until they’re _(savoring)_ fucking each other that Sam finally does, and then it’s light, almost wondering brushes with his fingertips. Teasing, after Keelan’s stronger caresses. Dean hates comparing the two, but he can’t help it, and he hates even more that Keelan’s touch sent so much more fire through his veins.

It’s that hatred that drives him to ask for it, lying face down on the bed while Sam hovers over him.

“Are you sure?” Sam asks.

“Just fucking do it already.”

So Sam does. Sam finally puts his hands on Dean’s wings, and traces them, and grips them where they meet his body and gives them a gentle tug, as though checking to see whether they’re really attached. The warmth is slow to start—because Sam is slow as well, still tentative—but soon enough Dean is panting into the pillow and rolling his hips.

“Jesus,” Sam breathes from behind him, hands faltering.

“Keep,” Dean moans. “Sammy, please.”

And then Sam puts his _mouth_ on them, and Dean’s heart is singing with how good it feels, Sam worshiping him like this. Worshipping all of him, and not just the brother he lost to Faerie what feels like years ago.

But it isn’t Keelan’s touch, and Dean has to stifle a sob at the unbearable realization that he cares.


	4. Listen

There are voices in the stillness.

Dean thinks they’re coming from other rooms at first, but the words don’t seem to have anything to do with this place. They’re too loud: too stale and artificial. They carry too much blood and iron. And the voices are harsh and grating, unlike the lilting melodies of Keelan’s people. They yell and bark and growl.

And sometimes, the voices call his name. The one Keelan says doesn't belong to him anymore.

Dean thinks he dreams them, some nights, when he wakes with the sound of frantic yelling in his ears. His heart races then, and he gropes beneath his pillow for something that isn’t there—a weapon, maybe, except he doesn’t ever remember holding anything more dangerous than a fluted glass of nectar.

On those nights, he wakes Keelan with his jerky, frightened movements, and then his lord makes hushing noises and slows Dean’s heart again with gentle pets and caresses. Keelan’s kisses wake Dean from the clinging uneasiness left by distant voices. His hands brush the fear from Dean’s body. And then, in the darkness, he rolls over and allows Dean to offer worship.

Dean's mouth and hands tremble as he touches Keelan's body, filled with an almost feverish need to please. He knows the softness of his lord's skin against his own, recognizes the pleasurable moans that fill the air. This is what he is. This is where he belongs.

After his savoring, Dean is allowed to stay close, wrapped up in his lord’s arms while Keelan strokes his hair.

“I wish I could guard over your dreams, Uaithne,” Keelan whispers, dropping a soft kiss on Dean’s temple. “It pains me to see you unhappy.”

 _Dean! Damn it, Michael, let him go!_

Dean shifts in his lord’s arms, trying to shake the voice away, and then presses closer.

“Tell me what I can do, love,” Keelan commands as he strokes one of Dean’s wings. “Anything within my power is yours.”

“Talk to me?” Dean asks after a moment of thought. “Tell me—tell me I belong here.”

“Always,” Keelan answers immediately. “You belong to me, Uaithne. My love, my light. My beautiful consort.”

 _Please, Dean,_ the other voice begs. _Oh God, please come back to me._

But Dean shuts his eyes, safe in his lord’s arms, and does his best not to listen.


	5. Moon

The moon is high and full and looks so heartbreakingly beautiful it makes Dean’s chest ache. It reminds him of things he knows he shouldn’t be thinking of, but can’t forget. He’s only been in this dead place for several days, and he already knows he won’t ever forget. The memories won’t ever fade.

“Hey, you got a light?”

Dean jerks around. His wings flinch beneath the blanket he wrapped around himself before sneaking out the front door. Heart hammering, he looks at the man standing to his right. The man isn’t really looking at him, focused on the cigarette pack in his hands, and Dean thinks about running before the man raises his head. He’s too terrified to move, though.

Keelan would save him if he were here.

“Buddy?” the man says, glancing up. His eyes meet Dean’s and change instantly. His pupils widen. His nostrils flare. He looks dazed.

No, not dazed. Hungry.

Dean takes an unconscious, fearful step backward and the man lunges after him, grabbing Dean’s biceps. The rough blanket shifts beneath his grip, scraping Dean’s skin, and he winces.

“Where do you think you’re going?” the man demands, yanking Dean close to his body. Dean’s wings flutter where they’re caught beneath the blanket, fighting helplessly for freedom. He tries to twist away.

“Let go,” he breathes. “Keelan will—”

“What are you?” the man demands, speaking over him. Not that it matters, since Keelan isn’t here, isn’t coming to his rescue.

Dean’s eyes sting as the man releases his left arm, shifting his grip down to Dean’s hip. The man holds him even closer, groins pressed together firmly enough for Dean to feel the man’s erection. He makes a soft, frightened noise and struggles harder.

“Like a dream,” the man says, leaning in and bumping his nose against Dean’s cheek. “You smell. You smell so good.”

“Please stop.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t—I don’t know what I’m doing.” The man moans the words, reluctant and helpless, but he isn’t just holding Dean against him any more but trying to pull the blanket away. “I just—just need a taste.”

“I don’t belong to you,” Dean whimpers, fighting for control of the blanket. He isn’t sure who he does belong to anymore, now that Sam took him from Keelan but doesn’t seem to want him for himself—keeps leaving Dean in the motel room all day, won’t touch him, will hardly even look at him—but it isn’t this stranger. Dean isn’t for him to touch.

Except he can’t keep hold of the blanket either, and it rips free, fluttering to the ground and revealing his naked chest and wings to the moonlight.

“Beautiful,” the man moans, and then his mouth is on Dean’s throat, and his hands are on Dean’s skin, and Dean is trembling.

“Please,” he tries one last time, wriggling his hips to avoid the fingers dipping beneath his sweats.

“Hey!”

Sam. Oh thank God, Sam.

The man is ripped away from him and Dean takes the opportunity to stumble back, hands crossed in front of his chest and hugging himself as Sam’s fist crashes into the man’s face again and again. He cuts his eyes away from the blood, to the blanket lying discarded on the ground in the moonlight, and considers retrieving it. But it’s too close to Sam and the man and all that violence, and in the end Dean stays where he is, wings shivering in time with his heartbeat.

Finally, when the man is limp and unconscious on the ground, Sam turns away from him and takes three hasty steps over to grab Dean by the arms.

“Did he hurt you?” he demands.

Dean shakes his head at the question, terrified by the wild quality to Sam’s gaze and the violence in his grip. Sam’s getting blood on his skin, smearing it across his trembling biceps.

“Are you sure? You’re okay?” Sam’s looking him up and down, eyes sharp in a way that they haven’t been on Dean since they came to this dull, dreary place. His hands are harsh and kneading on Dean’s skin, almost ... needy.

Dean perks up a little bit, hopeful, and then Sam drops him and turns away. He reaches down, grabbing the blanket, and thrusts it in Dean’s direction.

“Put that back on and get inside,” he snarls. “Jesus Christ, Dean, what were you thinking, coming out here alone?”

Dean drops his eyes to the ground while he does as he’s told, blinking back the fresh tears in his eyes. “I wanted to see the moon,” he mumbles.

“You wanted to—” Sam scoffs, deep in the back of his throat, and shakes his head. “You fucking moron! What if there’d been fae out here? Huh? You don’t even have any iron on. What the hell did you do with that cross I gave you?”

“It burned,” Dean protests, hugging the blanket to his chest. “I tried to wear it, Sam, really I did, but I couldn’t—” He rubs his chest where the cross used to lay through the blanket, remembering the reddened welt that he found there when he finally took the necklace off with fumbling fingers and flushed it down the toilet.

“What?” Sam’s voice is furious, promising punishment, and Dean is already shying back when his brother grabs him and gives him a shake. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Mostly because Dean was sure Sam would respond like this, but he can’t get his voice to work so instead he hangs his head further and doesn’t say anything.

Sam makes an annoyed sound into the silence and starts dragging him forward, back to the motel room. Back to the suffocating, dusty smell and the dimness. Back to his prison.

The blanket scratches against his wings with each step, harsh and cruel as everything else in this world, but Dean doesn’t protest as he follows.


	6. Tears

There’s a strong, green scent on the air as Dean looks out from the balcony. The stone railing feels smooth beneath his hands, almost silken. It’s pleasurable to the touch and to the eye both, just like everything else here in Keelan’s court.

From below, the strains of music flit up, and Dean watches as the twin suns set and are replaced by the wide girth of the moon, larger than he thinks it should be, and always a pale, soft blue. The light it gives off mingles periwinkle beams with silver stardust, and in the garden below, the night flowers uncurl and bloom: sable and violet and indigo petals reaching for the sky. Tiny lights flicker to life amidst the bushes and trees, lighting the way as the first of Keelan’s guests arrive.

There’s a dance tonight. There’s a dance every night, it seems.

Keelan is down there now, welcoming his court with warm smiles and high-stemmed glasses filled with something pink and sickly sweet that Dean couldn’t stomach the first time it was offered to him. He’s had time to acclimate now, and can tolerate it, even if he hasn’t quite come to enjoy the taste. He knows he should be down there with a glass in hand, greeting Keelan’s guests _(our guests, Keelan calls them)_ with his lord and standing close enough for Keelan to touch, but he can’t make himself move from his vantage point.

He hasn’t cried since that first day, when his memories begin on his back beneath the sky—not with any breath behind the sobs, anyway—but Dean finds himself crying now, for no real reason he can figure at all. Except that the dances and the feasts and the garden strolls and the rest of it are becoming routine, and it feels to him as though something is slipping away. And his shoulder blades ache, lately, in a way that he finds alarming.

No one to ask for advice on that, no one he trusts here.

He finds himself hoping that the soreness means he’s dying, but he doubts that’s the case. It doesn’t hurt enough for that, and anyway Keelan would never let that happen. He’d never let Dean go.

Below, the garden has filled with Keelan’s court—no more than a blur of color to Dean’s wet gaze—and Dean knows he’ll be missed now if he wasn’t before, and isn’t surprised when the door to the bedchamber opens behind him.

“Uaithne,” Keelan calls. His footsteps ring against the stone as he comes forward. “Why do you tarry?”

“That’s not my name,” Dean says, and hates the way his voice sounds.

He hates the way he’s dressed as well—bare chest and soft, clinging pants and no shoes. He doesn’t need shoes here, he supposes, but they seem like a necessary item for escape, and it bothers him that he lacks them. Not that he knows of anywhere to escape to, but there must be somewhere other than this, because Keelan speaks of stealing him and he already owns everything here.

Most of all, though, Dean hates the gaping void in his chest, where loneliness has taken up roost and left him heartsore.

Keelan wraps around him from behind, pressing their bodies together and resting one hand low on Dean’s stomach. Dean clenches his jaw and doesn’t shudder.

“Come dance, love.”

“I’m not in the mood,” Dean whispers, although Keelan is already swaying them both in time to the music rising up from below. Dean can hear laughter, and the bright chatter of voices, and the clink of glass. Keelan’s hand brushes his cheek.

“Tears, love?” Keelan murmurs in his ear. “Do you sorrow? Do you lack for anything?” His slender fingers trace the shimmering lines of moisture, wiping them away.

“I want to go home,” Dean confesses. He hasn’t said it before, not out loud. He hasn’t dared. “Please, just—let me go home.”

Wherever that might be.

But Keelan only laughs fondly, as though Dean has said something adorable, and draws him away from the window. “You _are_ home, Uaithne.”

Dean’s tears come faster at that, and he can’t quite resist another, harsher sob, and Keelan kisses his throat.

“Shh, love. Shh. The sadness will pass with your mortality. I promise.”

Dean doesn’t know what that means, but he’s sure he doesn’t like the sound of it. He’s about to say as much, when he realizes that Keelan isn’t leading him toward the door.

“I th-thought you w-wanted to dance,” he stammers as he’s eased down onto the bed.

Keelan’s smile is a flash of sunlight in the darkened room.

“There is dancing, and then there is dancing, love.” His fingers ease beneath the waistband of Dean’s pants and push them down. “Let me pleasure you.” His lips brush against Dean’s chest, tongue playfully flicking Dean’s nipple.

Dean gives a single, reluctant shudder and lies still.


	7. Spirit

“No.”

Dean just shuts his eyes and tries harder to scramble away. Keelan's hand tightens around his upper thigh, restrictive.

“No,” Keelan repeats.

“Let go,” Dean spits. He tries to sound vicious, but his voice is too high and frightened. Panic tastes like metal in his mouth.

“I told you, Uaithne,” Keelan says, implacable. “Just obey me and it won’t hurt this time. Now stop struggling.”

Dean doesn’t want to stop—he just wants to kick and bite and run—but it’s been made quite clear to him that he isn’t going anywhere. All ways here are Keelan’s ways, and Keelan is stronger than him besides. Keelan held him down before and took, and he can do it again.

Dean doesn’t think he can handle the pain a second time, not something so intimate and nauseating. Not that deep, throbbing burn, which left him with the illusory sensation of Keelan still moving within him hours after it was finally over.

With a hoarse sob, he grips the soft sheets in both hands and buries his face against the mattress.

“There,” Keelan soothes. Loosening his grip, he begins to slide his hand up between Dean’s legs. "Just like that."

Dean scrunches his eyes more tightly shut and presses his thighs together.

“No.”

This time, the reproof is accompanied by a stinging slap to the back of his legs. The strike is more humiliating than hurtful, but there's enough of a warning there for Dean's stomach to shrink in on itself. Reluctantly, he eases his thighs apart and lets Keelan caress the sensitive, private place between them.

“Don’t do this,” he begs, and then trembles as he feels Keelan’s mouth on his lower back. A slow, lingering kiss.

“You are my love, Uaithne,” Keelan breathes, fingering the crease of Dean’s buttocks. “Let me worship you.”

Dean can't actually remember otherwise, but he thinks that this can't be worship—not something that feels so much like dying. He tries to make himself smaller, rounding his back and curling sideways toward one spread leg, but he can't make himself small enough to escape Keelan's touch and he needs ... he needs to get _away_ before Keelan's fingers dip inside the way they're promising.

Without giving himself time to consider the possible ramifications of defiance, he flails out, bucking Keelan off and scrambling for the far side of the bed. Keelan is on him again almost instantly, tackling him against the mattress and making a displeased tsking noise.

“I do love your spirit, but you must learn some softness,” Keelan chides, pushing Dean’s thighs wide again. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

 _Liar,_ Dean thinks, but doesn’t say.

He tries to get an elbow back into Keelan’s stomach and then sucks in a pained breath as Keelan grips his hair and jerks his head back. Something is at his lips suddenly—smooth, glass rim—and tipped back. Liquid spills into Dean’s mouth, cloying and cold, and he sputters.

“Easy,” Keelan breathes, tipping the glass back further. “Easy, Uaithne. Just swallow. It will help.”

Dean does swallow—unwillingly, but there’s nothing else he can do when the liquid _(tastes like flowers, like sleep, like dreams)_ keeps pouring down his throat. Almost immediately, languid warmth spreads through his limbs and he droops against the bed with a weak groan.

Keelan wipes his lips and chin with gentle fingers, and Dean’s mind whirls, horrified. He can’t move but he can still feel everything. He can feel Keelan’s fingers move lower, trailing down Dean’s back to his buttocks and upper thighs.

“This will be sweet, love,” Keelan promises, settling himself into place. “I am going to show you how soft and pleasurable a savoring can be.”

It doesn’t hurt this time, but for some reason Dean still cries anyway.


	8. Taste

In Georgia, Sam turns his back for a second while they’re stopped at the side of the road and almost loses his brother for the fourth time. The unexpected rustle of wind alerts him to trouble, and he glances back to see Dean surrounded by what looks like a cyclone of leaves. It isn't until he takes a single, shocked step closer that he realizes the leaves aren’t leaves at all.

They're wings.

More of Keelan’s thieving followers.

The leaf-winged faeries are forcing Dean backward, buffeting his own spread wings with gales of wind as he tries to break through the circle and get back to Sam. They're driving Dean back toward the ring of toadstools Sam just noticed is less than three feet behind him.

Sam doesn’t waste his breath on a curse. Instead he leaps forward, drawing the iron knife at his waist and slashing out as soon as he's close enough to score a hit. Severed bits of autumn-colored wings drift to the ground and the tiny faeries let out a keening wail—a single sound from a hundred throats—and release Dean immediately.

It takes Sam almost two hours to get his brother to look at him.

In West Virginia, when they’re in a mine hunting a pack of ghouls, the hard-packed walls of the tunnel around them start to dribble dirt. Sam is ready to grab Dean and make a run for the surface _(be a bitch of a thing if, after everything they've been through, they end up suffocated in a cave in)_ when he sees the faces in the earth—grey, twisted things with pug noses and leering, leathery mouths. Sam hasn’t ever seen a goblin before, but when the first one pulls itself free from the mine wall there isn’t any question in his mind that that’s what they’re dealing with.

Dean is frozen beside him, eyes wide and lower lip trembling. His grip on the gun _(handle covered with padding to protect his hands from the iron)_ has gone lax, and as a second goblin joins the first, he drops the weapon completely.

Sam hasn’t ever seen his brother so afraid.

He doesn’t know how they get out of that one—afterward, he only has a vague, panicky recollection of grabbing Dean’s hand and running while sending bullets backwards with blind pulls on his shotgun.

“No more caves,” Sam promises later that night, as he holds Dean’s shivering body close in their bed.

He passes the hunt off through Bobby and the next day they’re on their way to Connecticut.

Just outside of Coventry, a small river comes alive and overflows its banks. It grips at Dean’s ankles and tries to pull him in, and Sam can see eyes in the water, and tiny, webbed hands. It takes the Impala to end the attack that time: Sam jumping behind the wheel and driving it through the long, grasping river tendrils. The engine fries immediately, but the water loses its shape and runs back into the river, leaving Sam with his frantic brother to calm and a tow truck to call.

It keeps happening.

There’s a kelpie in Framingham. A trio of kobolds at a gas station in Maryland. A swarm of pixies just outside of Boulder, Colorado.

Not even sticking to larger cities _(New York, Las Angeles, Chicago)_ keeps them away, not now they’ve had a taste, and the day that Sam comes back to their Detroit motel room to find Dean screaming for him in the bathroom—there’s a fucking undine clawing its way up from the bathtub drain—Sam has officially had enough. He covers Dean’s wings with a blanket and then packs him into the Impala, then points them toward South Dakota.

Twelve hours later, after driving with his foot pressed to the floorboards the entire way and only stopping to refuel _(Dean’s not allowed out of the car; Sam doesn’t care how sick all the metal is making him feel, or how badly he has to piss—that’s what bottles are for)_ , he pulls into Singer’s Salvage. Bobby isn’t back yet—he was off on a hunt when Sam called to let the man know they were coming; Sam guesses he’ll be back sometime tomorrow afternoon. Sam lets himself in anyway, and then hustles Dean out of the car and inside.

Dean starts toward their normal room, but Sam grabs his brother’s arm in an uncompromising grip and leads him downstairs instead, down to the basement and the room he knows all too well. About halfway down the steps, Dean figures out where they're headed and starts to struggle.

“No,” he says in that melodious, breathy voice Sam just can’t get used to. “Sammy, no!”

“This isn’t a discussion, Dean,” Sam snaps. His brother’s futile, pathetic attempts to make him let go aren't helping the frightened pulse of anger inside him. He hates being cornered and run to ground like this, but he hates the way Dean is acting even more.

Dean knows how to fight, damn it. Sam’s seen him do it on hunts; he’s seen Dean rock a black dog’s head back with a well-placed hook kick, wings or no. But when it comes to anything from Faerie, or to Sam himself, Dean just ... it’s like wrestling with a fucking five-year-old.

Pissed as he is, Sam is maybe a little harsher than he should be when he hurls Dean past the threshold and into the panic room. Dean stumbles and then falls, just barely catching himself on the edge of the cot instead of crashing into it face first. He jerks his hands away immediately, wings and shoulders shaking, and curls his fingers down against his palms with a sob.

“Please,” he begs, looking up at Sam with hurt, wet eyes. “Don’t do this to me, Sam. Please.”

“It’s the only way to keep you safe,” Sam says resolutely, and then steps back and shuts the door before Dean can clamber to his feet. He spins the wheel, locking the door in place, and then rests his forehead against the metal and listens to Dean scrambling around inside and calling for him. Listens to his brother’s increasingly frantic sobs while his shoulders shake with his own, silent tears.

Now he knows how Dean felt, standing out here and listening to him detox. But Dean couldn’t let him out then, and Sam can’t let Dean out now. Bobby’s panic room is the only safe place Sam knows: thick sheets of iron on all four sides. There isn’t a faerie in the world that can get through that—Sam doesn’t care how determined they are to get their hands on his brother.

He stands guard outside the door until Dean’s cries grow hoarse and finally cease, and then, with the broken parts of his chest grating together painfully, takes himself upstairs to wait for Bobby.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It’s almost two o’clock the next afternoon when Bobby finally shows up. Sam meets him at the door, and Bobby takes one look at him and sighs.

“Christ, kid, how long’s it been since you slept?”

Sam can’t remember, so he ignores the question to say, “We need a ritual. Something to hide him from them, so they can’t see him.”

Bobby hitches his cap up briefly as he edges past Sam into the house, and then draws it down again. “We’ll do what we can.” Looking around, he moves further into the house and then asks, “Dean in your room?”

“I put him in the panic room,” Sam says, closing and locking the front door.

When he turns around, Bobby is staring at him with an expression of shocked horror. Sam shifts a little beneath the weight of the man’s stare, uncomfortable, and then flinches when Bobby finally gets his voice back and barks, “You did _what_?”

“I put him in the—” Except Sam is talking to Bobby’s back now because the man is swearing and sprinting toward the basement stairs. Sam’s heart lurches as he launches himself after Bobby, “Bobby, what? What’s wrong?”

“Boy’s more than half fey and you locked him up in an iron bowl?” Bobby growls over his shoulder. “Why didn’t you just stick a damned knife in him?”

This time, the lurch of horror is stronger. Sam knew Dean didn’t like iron: knew that touching it hurt him. He just ... he wasn’t thinking. He was too frightened something was going to get past him and take Dean away again.

“Oh my god,” he breathes, and then puts on a burst of speed that barrels him past Bobby and down to the bottom of the stairs. He sprints to the panic room door, calling his brother’s name, and fumbles at the lock mechanism. He can’t get his fingers to work right, though, and his palms are sweaty, and fuck, there aren’t any sounds coming from the other side of the door.

Dean’s been in there for over twenty-four hours.

“Move!” Bobby demands as he comes up next to Sam, and Sam finds himself bodychecked to one side. It takes Bobby only a moment to do what Sam couldn’t and draw back the bolts, and Sam is pushing his way inside before the man has pulled the door more than halfway open.

Dean is a crumpled, trembling mess in the center of the floor. His skin is ashen, his lips cracked. His wings look shriveled where they twitch on his back. His eyes are open, but Sam can tell that he isn’t seeing anything. As he skids to a stop beside his brother, his eyes catch on one of Dean’s outstretched hands—lying upturned on the concrete floor—and he lets out a choked sob at the red, burnt welt across his brother’s palm. From where Dean grabbed the iron frame of the cot to keep himself from falling, Sam guesses.

“I’m here, Dean,” he babbles, getting one hand beneath his brother’s shoulders and another under the back of Dean’s legs. “Gonna get you out of here, okay? You’re gonna be fine.”

It’s pathetic how easy it is to lift Dean. Like there isn’t anything to him but bones and skin.

“I’m sorry,” Sam whispers as he carries his brother away from all of the iron. “I’m so sorry, baby.”

He doesn’t stop until they’re out in the open air, beneath the clean sunlight. It hurts to breathe as he drops to his knees while cradling Dean to his chest. Hurts to know that he did this to his brother. He locked him in what amounted to an oven, or a bowl of acid, and left him there.

Oh god, what kind of sick monster is he?

When Dean finally blinks back to pained coherency, his eyes are trusting and grateful on Sam’s face. The weak smile he offers as reassurance makes Sam want to scream.

"Thank you," he whispers.

Sam shuts his eyes and turns his face away, but he can't stop the tears from spilling down his cheeks, hot and damning and deserved.


	9. Hunger

Dean changes in an instant.

He’s been fading for days, ever since Sam found him and claimed him and took him back into the real world. He’s still impossibly beautiful, of course, with those wings spread out behind him like twin panes of velvet-covered glass _(or maybe spun sugar)_ but it’s almost as though there’s a thickening layer of dust on that glass. The sugar has hardened and crystallized and begun to crack.

They should look strange—delicate butterfly wings on a man of Dean’s stature—but Dean carries them in a way that makes it all seem as natural as breathing. Sam doesn’t want to imagine how long that comfort translates to in Faerie time. He doesn’t want to know how many months _(years?)_ that thieving, memory-wiping bastard held his brother in a dream-like limbo. And he really, really doesn’t want to know what the faerie was doing to Dean there—although from what he saw during his short visit, he can guess.

But Sam does want to know what’s causing Dean’s eyes to light up like that, and the blue in his wings to shock from dull navy back to brilliant, glowing sapphire. The black edging deepens as well, becoming as liquid and deep as night.

“Dean,” Sam manages. “What—”

And then Dean is kissing him.

Sam lets it happen for a moment, too off-guard to protect himself against the instinctive, greedy desire that flares in his chest, and then gets his hands up and pushes Dean away. He starts to rise—needs some space between them—and Dean grabs his shirt and hauls him in again. Dean is more demanding this time, mouth lush and hungry and skilled on Sam’s. More skilled than Sam wants it to be, even as he turns his face to the side and tries to pry his brother’s fingers loose.

“Dean, stop,” he says. “You don’t—you don’t want this.”

Because he doesn’t. Sam knows he doesn’t. Dean never shared Sam’s sickness—not before that fae son of a bitch got his hands on him, anyway.

“Please,” Dean begs, and the sound of his voice makes Sam’s stomach tremble with heat. “Please, Sammy, I need it. I’m so fucking hungry, please.”

Sam’s gut lurches at that, and his chest pulses with pain, and he clamps his mouth shut on a roar of denial. Because he’s smart enough to understand what Dean is trying to tell him—to understand that they’ve finally stumbled across something that Dean can gain strength and sustenance from—but he doesn’t want it to be true. He doesn’t want Dean backed into this corner, doesn’t want to force this on his brother.

But fuck, he’d have to be a stronger man than he is to resist the feverish, coaxing kisses Dean is laying along his jaw and down his neck. He’d have to be a eunuch to ignore Dean’s heat, and his light, and the goddamned smell of him.

Looks like Sam isn’t as immune to his brother’s pheromones as he thought.

“Sammy,” Dean babbles. “Taste so good, please. God, please, man, I’m fucking begging you. I’ll make it good. I can make it so fucking good.”

Sam kisses him then. Sam kisses him because he doesn’t know how else to shut Dean up and he can’t listen to that abject pleading anymore.

Dean kisses back like he’s starving, like Sam is light and air and warmth and Dean would wither away if he stopped touching him for a moment. Dean is ravenous as he tears Sam’s clothes from his body, and Sam’s stupid enough and hungry enough himself to let him, to let Dean push him down onto the bed and straddle his body and sink down with a hurt, rapturous groan.

Sam has no way of knowing that feeding Dean like this won’t end with him sucked dry like an incubus victim. It seems likely, in fact—after all, the energy Dean receives from this is going to have to come from somewhere. Right now, though, with his brother straining above him and clenching around him and with those beautiful, impossible wings spread out before him like a glowing canopy, he doesn’t actually care.


	10. Shadow

As soon as Sam gets Dean into the motel room and the door shut on the world behind them, he grabs his cell phone off the desk where he left it and makes the call.

“Cas? I’ve got him.”

He blinks and the angel is there, showing just as little concern for Sam’s personal bubble as ever. Sam looks down at him for a moment and then hangs up the phone before it can get too weird. After a brief delay, Castiel follows suit and then turns around, scanning the room.

Dean is in plain sight, sitting on the bed nearer to the door where Sam put him when they came in. He has his wings _(honest-to-God wings, Sam can't look at them without his stomach swooping alarmingly)_ pulled in tight around his body and his eyes locked on Sam. He's watching Sam like Sam is some kind of strange, threatening dog, and Sam can't blame his brother for it. Not after the way he lost it when he was chasing Dean through the woods.

Sam yelled at Dean after he finally managed to tackle him to the ground. Practically screamed at Dean when Dean's response was to flinch away. As Dean moved, he somehow managed to tilt his head, and it was easy to read submission in the vulnerable line of his bared throat, which he was clearly and unconsciously offering up in the face of Sam's anger.

It makes Sam sick and sad to recall the evidence of what his brother went through, the evidence of what was done to him—not that he needs any more, not when that elf-bastard's hands were all over Dean in the Great Hall—but in the moment all he felt was fury. Toward the kidnapping _(raping)_ son of a bitch and not Dean, but of course Dean was the only available target, and anyway Sam had been terrified at the thought of his brother running off alone.

Screw Sam's own hang-ups and needs: Dean simply can't be on his own when he's like this. The world out there would eat him alive, and that's without some supernatural son of bitch with a score to settle getting at him first. It's all too easy to imagine what a demon wandering across this strange, passive version of Sam's brother would do.

Looking at the apprehension in Dean's eyes is too difficult, so Sam concentrates on his brother's gossamer wings instead. They tremble where they shield his body, delicate and light and too beautiful to be real, and Sam reflexively rubs his hands on his jeans. He remembers touching those wings, back when he was getting his coat over Dean by the highway. It was just a passing brush of his fingers, accidental and casual, but the heat that went through him was almost strong enough to bring him to his knees—was, in fact, the reason he was distracted enough to let Dean break away from him in the first place.

Fuck, he’s never felt anything so soft.

Beside Sam, Castiel finishes his turn and then glances over, grim mouthed. “Well?” he says. “Where is he?”

“Where—he’s _right there_ , Cas!” Sam’s pulse speeds as he points to his brother. He’d like to believe that the emotion seizing his chest in an iron grip is anger and not fear, but he can’t.

He can’t because Castiel has twisted around again—he’s staring right at Dean—and from the expression on his face, the sight isn’t registering at all.

Fuck, what if Sam doesn’t have Dean back after all? What if he only _thought_ he grabbed him? What if this is just some kind of taunting fairy game, and Dean is still stuck in that sickly-sweet illusion? What if that long-fingered son of a bitch is touching him right now, touching him and—

Sam cuts that thought off ruthlessly, but he knows he won't be able to hold it at bay for long. Not if Castiel unravels his hard-earned victory thread by gossamer thread.

Then Castiel squints and moves closer to the bed. Dean shivers at the angel's approach, as though touched by an icy wind, and scurries back against the headboard. He makes a soft, choked noise and turns his face away, squeezing his eyes shut while he clings to the worn wood. As much as it hurts to see Dean acting so cowed, Sam is relieved to note some evidence of interaction, and he doesn't protest as Castiel steps up next to the bed and reaches toward his brother.

“There’s a shadow here,” Castiel says with a frown.

His hand passes right through Dean’s chest, like he’s nothing but a ghost—or perhaps it's Dean who fades from Castiel's touch. The noise Dean makes this time is sharper—pure panic—and he throws himself off the bed, wings snapping wide as he sprints to the far wall. There, he gets his back against the off-white plaster, breath coming fast and arms crossed protectively in front of his chest and stomach. He’s crying, Sam is dismayed to see, and his tears aren't anything like they used to be. Even at his lowest, Dean never looked quite so helpless when he cried. He never made those soft, hitching gasps.

Without thinking, Sam steps toward his brother, keeping both hands raised to show that he’s harmless.

“Dean, it’s okay,” he promises.

But Dean shakes his head. “S-something’s here,” he insists.

“It’s just Castiel.”

Recognition flickers through Dean’s eyes at the name, closely followed by something that looks like pain. But he straightens a little after a few seconds, tears starting to taper off.

“I can’t see him,” Castiel says softly as he comes to stand by Sam’s side. His expression is even glummer than usual. “Nothing but a shadow. I’m sorry, Sam. We were too late.”

Sam turns without thinking about it, grabbing onto the angel’s coat and using it to haul Castiel around and slam him against the motel door. He can feel Dean's eyes on him, knows that this changed Dean must be frightened to see him wrestling with something that looks like air, but he can’t spare a moment to reassure his brother.

“Fuck you, Cas,” he spits instead, locking his eyes with the angel's. “I got him _out_. Now you do your job and you fix him.”

“I can’t,” Castiel protests. “I would if I could, believe me, but Dean is beyond my reach.”

“You’re an angel. You can travel through time. You can _bring the dead to life_. A couple of wings shouldn’t be—”

“I can't break the Treaty, Sam,” Castiel interrupts. “It isn't a question of willingness, but ability. I truly can't do anything."

"What Treaty?"

"In the first War, when Lucifer Fell, he sought to ally himself with the nations of the Fey. They're a powerful people, and he would have been greatly strengthened by such an alliance. My brothers managed to prevent it by engaging in negotiations of their own, but in order to secure the Fey's neutrality, we had to bind ourselves with unbreakable oaths. One of the agreements reached was that our people and theirs would remain invisible to one another. It explains why I can't see Dean."

"He's not a fucking fairy!" Sam roars, giving Castiel a shake for emphasis.

The angel allows himself to be shaken and regards Sam with sad, steady eyes. "I'm sorry, Sam. What the Fey have set their seal to, I can not touch.”

“What about _Michael’s_ fucking seal, huh?” Sam demands, pulling Castiel forward a little so that he can slam him back into the wall again. “If you're telling the truth, then they never should have touched him!"

“Michael removed his mark when the war ended,” Castiel says, just as calm and collected as ever. “Dean wanted it that way. I’m sorry, Sam, but they didn’t break any laws. Dean belongs to them now. You should—” He hesitates, frowning, and then finishes, “You should give him back.”

As if that’s an option. As if it's _ever_ going to be an option.

“That son of a bitch is never touching Dean again,” Sam growls when he recovers his voice. “Not ever."

Forcing his hands open, he releases the angel and takes a step back. When he looks over at Dean, he finds his brother on his knees, trying to make himself as small as possible. As though he can hide when he's the brightest, most breathtaking thing in the room.

"He was mine first, Cas," Sam whispers, watching the way Dean's wings move slightly with each shallow breath. "I’ll find a way to make him mine again ... with or without your help.”


	11. Light

It’s too bright in the sunlight here—twin suns beating down, covering everything in a wash of brilliance and leaving nowhere to hide. Dean just wants to go back inside, back to the bed he hates but where there are sheets he can burrow into. Sheets he can put between his skin and Keelan’s eyes.

But Keelan wants to look at him. Keelan wants to see him in the sun. Keelan wants him naked beneath the wide expanse of sky.

They’re the only ones here—Keelan sent his court away so that he could give Dean his undivided attention—but in a way that makes it even worse. Dean can feel his lord’s eyes on his skin as he moves, tracing the flex of muscles and the rise and fall of his breath. Keelan is just sitting there, doing nothing but watching as Dean walks around the garden and does his best to pretend he’s alone, and clothed, and free.

It's difficult to imagine anything but this—he can't remember anything else—but if Dean tries very, very hard he can see himself flying over something hard and flat and grey. He soars across the earth, close to the ground, and there is a bar of white to his right and a bar of yellow to his left, and all around him it smells of metal, and leather, and if he turns his head to one side he'll be able to see—

But that's when hands close around his waist. Dean stills obediently, letting the fantasy go, and when Keelan tugs on him he allows himself to be pulled back against his lord’s chest. His heart pounds, running the way he isn’t allowed to.

“You truly are a thing of beauty, Uaithne,” Keelan praises him. His hands travel up and down Dean’s bare chest and stomach. “I could watch you all day and never tire of the way the light kisses your skin.”

Dean knows what’s expected of him, but it still takes a couple of tries to get it out. “Th-thank you.”

Keelan kisses his cheek. “Thank you ...”

“Thank you, lord.” Because it’s either that or ‘love’, and Dean just can’t stomach that one.

“Mmm,” Keelan purrs, running his hand down Dean’s stomach to his manhood and stroking it.

Dean is getting used to the way his body responds, but he still feels betrayed and shamed when the soft flesh rises. He shuts his eyes, waiting for Keelan’s other hand to part the globes of his buttocks so that he can be savored, but instead Keelan gives him another kiss and then releases him and steps back.

“I want to watch you,” Keelan says.

Dean’s eyes flutter open and he glances back over his shoulder, uncertain. “Lord?”

“Pleasure yourself for me,” Keelan says, folding himself down onto the grass and leaning back on one elbow.

But Dean isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do, and his confusion only makes the embarrassment worse. He feels a flush creep across his skin and knows that it’s clearly visible in the bright sunlight.

“I don’t know what you want,” he confesses, dropping his eyes.

“Use your hand to touch yourself as I do,” Keelan explains patiently. “I want to see you spill your pleasure out beneath the sunlight.”

Dean blushes harder at the thought of that pleasurable rush overtaking him out here in the open, in the light. His stomach flutters anxiously—even in the privacy of their bedroom, that feeling frightens and shames him: how much he enjoys it. How much he craves it. He weeps, usually, when it happens, and buries his face against Keelan’s shoulder or the mattress and waits for the warm, tingling feeling to go away.

If he does what Keelan is asking him to do now, he won’t be able to hide.

“Please don’t make me do this,” he whispers as a single tear spills from his eye and runs down his cheek.

“I would never force you to do anything you wouldn’t enjoy, love,” Keelan replies. “But I know you want to please me, don’t you?”

Yes, of course. Things are easier when Keelan is happy—when Dean is pleasing. He manages a nod.

“It would greatly please me to see you pleasure yourself, Uaithne.”

The words are soft, but there’s a trace of threat beneath them—something cold and demanding—and Dean swallows a wet sob as he nods again and grips his manhood. He forces himself to think about how Keelan normally touches him and tries to emulate his lord’s technique. He thinks he manages—he does his best, anyway—but his manhood remains soft and uninterested.

“I’m sorry,” he chokes out, crying harder. He’s sure to be punished now, although of course Keelan won’t call it that. Won’t actually hurt him. Not on the outside, anyway.

“Shh, love,” Keelan soothes, pushing off the grass and walking over. He kisses Dean’s tears away while sliding his own hand into place over Dean’s. “Like this,” he says, moving their hands up and down over Dean’s manhood. “Gentle at first. Tease yourself.”

He catches Dean’s other hand and guides it down to the fullness of his sacs. Dean starts at the sensation of his own fingers brushing where they don’t usually go. No one but Keelan has ever touched him here.

“Fondle yourself. Go ahead, give them a little tug.”

Dean does, feeling sick and horribly exposed, but the trick works. His manhood has slowly, haltingly, begun to fill.

“That’s very good for a start, Uaithne,” Keelan praises him, and rewards him with a quick kiss. “Why don’t you spend the rest of the afternoon practicing? I’ll be gone tonight—I ride with the Hunt—but tomorrow you can show me what you learned, yes?”

There it is, the barbed punishment. If Dean had managed to do what Keelan wanted the first time, he wouldn’t have to spend the rest of the day thinking about nothing but that uncomfortable, naked moment of bliss. He wouldn’t have to spend it doing things to his body he doesn’t remember ever doing before—things he has no interest in doing now. He wouldn’t have tomorrow’s encore performance to look forward to.

But Keelan is looking at Dean as though he expects him to be grateful, and Dean somehow manages a smile before he can make it worse on himself.

“Thank you for the opportunity, lord.”

“You’re welcome. Now, give me a proper farewell before I go.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

When Keelan leaves some time later, Dean’s knees are stained with streaks of green from the grass. He's wet inside, and loose, and there are streaks of milky fluid on his thighs—remnants of the shameful effect these savorings have on his body. He kneels quietly for a while, breathing and feeling the sunlight soaking into his muscles, and then, shutting his eyes, sits back on his heels.

It feels different when he grips his softening manhood and begins to practice—the softening flesh is overly sensitive, almost painful—but Dean perseveres anyway.

His lord expects him to perform tomorrow, and he isn’t going to disappoint.


	12. Wind

It starts as a wind. Not a real wind, not the wind Dean feels on his skin when Keelan takes him for strolls in the garden. This wind is inside of him, and it smells sweet, like honey. Like the pink liquid that Keelan keeps forcing on him.

Keelan is savoring him at the time—that’s what he calls it, anyway—and when Dean jerks at the phantom sensation of wind, Keelan’s hands tighten on his arms in warning.

“Sorry,” Dean mumbles, stilling.

“Did I harm you, Uaithne?” Keelan whispers in his ear as he begins to move again.

“No.” It doesn’t hurt. Hasn’t since that first time by the pool. But that was Dean’s own fault. After all, Keelan warned him he wouldn’t like what was going to happen if he ran.

“What’s troubling you, then?” Keelan asks, mouthing at Dean’s jaw.

“I—there’s a wind.”

Keelan goes still for a moment and then, carefully, withdraws. Dean winces at the uncomfortable, open sensation his lord leaves behind and shifts against the bed.

“How have you been feeling, love?” Keelan’s hands skim over the swell of his ass up along the curve of his lower back to his shoulder blades. “How do you feel here?”

Dean didn’t want to say anything, but he can’t ignore a direct question. “Aches,” he breathes reluctantly.

“I can make the pain go away,” Keelan tells him, soothing his hands over Dean’s skin. “You just have to do one thing for me.”

“W-what?” Dean asks, trembling.

Keelan doesn’t answer with words but with gentle, guiding hands. Dean considers resisting when he realizes what his lord wants, but it feels like the futile action of a fool. His body isn’t his, and Keelan will have what he wants regardless, and it isn’t as though this act is as intimate as the savoring Keelan was doing a moment ago.

It doesn’t taste the way Dean thought it would. It tastes sweet, like the wind. Like that pink liquid. He finds himself sucking more enthusiastically while Keelan’s hands curl in his hair.

“Beautiful,” Keelan praises him, and Dean’s chest gives a pulse of gratitude as the flesh in his mouth jumps. A moment later, there’s a spurt of liquid—familiar, if not in this precise way—and Dean casts his eyes up for instruction. These are uncharted waters, and he doesn’t know which action to choose to avoid punishment.

He wants to avoid punishment.

“Drink, love,” Keelan urges, fingers fluttering across Dean’s throat, and as Dean swallows the wind and the ache intensify until he thinks he’s going to pass out.

Then there’s a tearing sensation, and something like a starburst, and Dean collapses on the bed with a gasp, letting Keelan’s flesh fall from his mouth. He can feel muscles he doesn’t remember having before shift in his back. Feels something delicate and damp brush his skin with a flutter. Those new muscles shift again and something wrinkled and shining comes into view.

A wing.

Not like a bird’s, with feathers and sturdy warmth. Thinner than that, like gossamer silk. And the color—shimmering, glowing blue edged with black, becoming more vivid by the moment—is also like no bird Dean has ever seen.

The muscles in his back twitch again and the wing moves in lazy strokes, drying off.

Keelan touches the second of the pair—the one Dean can’t see—and the contact sends a shudder through his entire body. His groin feels hot, his chest full. He wants ... He wants to be savored.

Behind him, Keelan chuckles warmly. “Welcome home, Uaithne.”


	13. Dream

When Dean wakes, Sam is watching him.

It takes Dean a moment to process his brother’s grave eyes, and the heavy frown on his face, and the stiff way he’s sitting in the chair he pulled up alongside the bed, because most of him is still twined around Keelan. He can still feel his lord’s hands in his hair—too short now because Sam cut it last week. It felt like Sam was clipping bits of Dean’s soul away while he worked, but Dean didn’t protest.

Sam needs him to look as close to right as he can, and Dean feels guilty enough about all the other things he’s withholding from his brother to refuse giving him that much.

Yawning, Dean stretches with the slow sensuality that Keelan taught him. He relishes the tug on his muscles, the pleasant tremors that shake his wings. It always feels good, centering himself in his body like this.

He doesn’t really need to go through the routine a second time, but watching usually seems to put Sam in a good mood—puts his mind on savoring, anyway, distracting him from the thousands of fretful thoughts that leave that unhappy, worried line between his eyebrows. This time, the stretch is more enticement than routine, and Dean keeps his eyes sleepy and low-lidded.

Sam’s expression darkens.

Not today, then.

“Morning,” Dean says, sitting up. He’s careful to use the lowest, gruffest register he can manage, but he’s still well aware that his voice is too polished and warm to belong in this place. It comes out like distilled honey before curdling in the sour, dull air.

“You were dreaming.”

No dancing around the bush, no dissembling. Just that stark accusation. Just Sam’s eyes, boring into Dean’s and making his wings droop a little in shame. He considers lying, but only in passing. Sam isn’t quite as good as Keelan at sniffing out falsehoods, but he’s gifted enough.

Dean lowers his gaze and gets out of bed. He remembers that avoidance used to work, before. Hopefully it will continue to work now. Dean will go into the bathroom and shower and when he comes back out Sam will have dropped the whole thing.

Except instead Sam reaches out and grabs Dean’s wrist as he moves to walk past his brother’s chair, halting him.

“You were dreaming about _him_ ,” Sam says.

There’s heat in his voice, riding it like a summer whirlwind, and the tiny shiver of Dean’s wings is completely unfeigned. He shifts his weight from one foot to the other, contemplating flight. His stomach trembles, filled with an unfamiliar, heated anxiety that he hasn’t felt since Faerie. Sam’s fingers around his wrist are as tight and unforgiving as bands of iron.

“Let go,” Dean tries.

“Why?” Sam demands. “What are you gonna do if I don’t?”

Dean isn’t sure—he thinks that the man he used to be would have had some quick reply, or maybe would just have acted without resorting to hollow bravado, but all Dean can think of is the bite of thorns and the phantom curl of the lash. All he can remember are his lessons not to argue: to just submit and be good and gentle and soft.

 _Sam, not Keelan,_ Dean reminds himself sternly. It helps a little. Sam isn’t like Keelan. He isn’t as strict. When Dean makes mistakes here—when he acts incorrectly—he’s punished with sad eyes and sighs, not blood and pain.

Except Sam is acting funny, and the air in the room tastes overly dry and metallic in Dean’s mouth, and he isn’t sure what to expect.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” Sam says into the silence now. “Tell me you weren’t dreaming about him.”

“Fuck you,” Dean snaps. They’re easy words to say, and if they’re a tad more frightened than furious, well, the violent way Dean jerks his wrist free should counterbalance any signs of weakness.

But Sam just grabs him again, surging up from the chair to do so, and this time he isn’t satisfied with holding Dean still. This time, he grabs Dean’s shoulder with one hand and his waist with the other and hauls him across the motel room into the bathroom. Dean goes, feeling a little winded _(and a little reassured: it’s easy to submit, to take whatever punishment is coming)_ , and finds himself tossed against the edge of the sink. Sam crowds up close behind him, gripping his chin and holding his head up, forcing him to meet his reflection head on.

Dean stares into his own, otherworldly green eyes—the rise of electric blue wings behind him—and his pulse races.

“Look at yourself!” Sam snarls. “You look what that son of a bitch did to you! He raped you, Dean! He didn’t fucking love you! He isn’t capable of love!”

Dean isn’t sure that’s true—Keelan cherished him, and took care of him, and pleasured him, and if that isn’t love then Dean doesn’t know what is—but he doesn’t want to argue. Not when Sam is so wild and raging behind him. Being quiet doesn’t seem to be the right choice either, though, because Sam makes a furious noise and wraps an arm low around Dean’s waist, yanking him close. Sam’s mouth finds Dean’s ear, panting against the shell with moist heat.

“Is that what it’s going to take for you to want to be here with me? You want me to do that to you? You want me to hurt you? Treat you like some kind of sex toy? Do you?”

Part of Dean answers an enthusiastic yes—at least then he’ll know his place, know what’s expected of him—but another, deeper place inside of him twists in distress. His head jerks without his permission—no—and Sam releases him with a curse, stepping away while wiping a hand over his mouth.

Slowly and cautiously, Dean straightens. He keeps an eye on his brother’s pacing in the mirror, listening to Sam’s incomprehensible mutters. His brother's dangerous, violent mood seems to have broken into something gentler but more genuinely alarming: something that makes Dean’s chest ache with shared sorrow.

“Don’t be sad,” he says.

Sam laughs, an unhappy sound, and shakes his head without looking at Dean.

“I’m sorry, Sam,” Dean adds. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

Sam stops at that, and drags a hand through his hair before asking, “Every night? Have you been dreaming about him every night?”

Dean considers it for a moment, casting his mind back, and while the answer is yes, he’s surprised to find it paired with another, deeper truth. The second truth warms him inside, and chases away the worst of the ache, and he turns with more confidence to face his brother.

“Since you came and got me, yeah,” he answers honestly. Before Sam can do more than make a tiny, hurt noise at that, he moves forward and wraps himself around Sam, holding onto his brother’s bulk as tightly as he can manage. “But it was you before that, Sammy. I couldn’t remember when I woke up, but in Faerie, I always dreamed of you.”


	14. Memory

Memory is the first thing they take from him, holding him down in a pool of water until his clothes are heavy and sodden with it, until the water gets in his mouth and down his throat and washes everything away. Everything but his name, for some reason, because even when he’s finally allowed to surface and falls coughing and shuddering onto the soft grass, he remembers that he’s Dean.

His name is Dean and he is, he thinks, in hostile territory.

He tries to come up fighting, but the creatures that held him—squat bodies with long, spindly arms and button-black eyes—tumble away through what Dean now sees is a garden, lush and verdant. The sky, when he tilts his head back, has twin, pale suns and glitters with something like stardust.

When Dean lowers his face again—filled with the certainty that something is wrong, that this is wrong—he’s there. He’s tall and fair-haired with eyes like shards of ice and clothing that looks nothing like what Dean has on.

Dean doesn’t know that he likes the expression on the stranger’s face.

“So beautiful,” the stranger says, in a soft, lilting voice, and Dean moves back a step automatically, one foot slipping back into the pool where his memories begin and end.

“Who are you?” he demands. His voice sounds strange in the air—too harsh. He doesn’t belong here.

“Your king,” the stranger replies, standing there with a calm stillness that Dean doesn’t—can’t—trust. When the stranger smiles at him, Dean’s heart pounds a little quicker in his ribcage and he runs without thinking, through the garden and away from the stranger, away from the pool. He runs until his pulse is pounding in his head, until he’s dizzy with exhaustion, and then stumbles out through a high, flowering hedge and knee-deep into the same, still pool.

The stranger is sprawled on the grassy bank, waiting for him.

“What the fuck,” Dean mutters.

“All ways here are my ways,” the stranger responds, rising. He extends one hand—long fingers, delicate wrist. “Come here.”

Dean gives his head a single, instinctive shake and moves backward.

The stranger’s expression darkens, insistent. “You are mine, mortal. I snatched you out of your world and into mine and I will have the prize I have claimed. I will taste your beauty. The only question is whether you will force me to pull you down first, like a hound giving chase to the hind.” His smile is wider this time, wide enough to show the fine glitter of sharp canines in his mouth. “The hind does not enjoy the end to that particular chase, as I recall.”

Dean is hours new to this world, remembers nothing at all, but he knows enough to realize that submission is the wise choice here. He knows he should do whatever this thing is demanding.

But he runs. He twists his path this time, winding past towering lanes of roses and grand willow trees and shady boughs of ivy. He catches glimpses of strange faces in the underbrush and once, off in the distance, the high walls of what looks like a castle. And then he trips over a root—fucker lurched up to grasp at his foot—and when he falls it’s into the pool with an echoing splash.

The stranger is on him in a second, and Dean’s clothes are the second thing taken from him, torn away like rags by hands that seem like they should be no stronger than a sparrow’s wing.

“No!” Dean spits, struggling, and it seems he knew how to do this once upon a time, that he knew more than this ineffectual flailing. But he doesn’t remember anymore and after little more than a brief tussle, he ends up on his back on the grass with the stranger poised over him.

“Don’t,” Dean says, begging this time, even though he still doesn’t know what it is the stranger wants, but the stranger only bares those sharp teeth at him and holds him down.

And there, beneath the twin suns of a starlit sky, in full view of all the whispering, laughing creatures rustling through the garden leaves, the stranger takes from him for the third, irrevocable time.


	15. Stars

“I have a gift for you, love.”

Dean was watching the moths—pale pink wings, and dusky violet, and baby blue—flit here and there about a flowering bush beneath the moonlight, entranced by their movements, but he turns immediately at the sound of his lord’s voice. His whole body burns at the sight of Keelan, so beautiful, and when Keelan tilts his face up for a kiss Dean opens his mouth for it and returns the gesture with the pliant eagerness Keelan seems to like from him.

He does a good job, he can tell from the soft noise his lord makes, and then Keelan’s hands are on him, and Keelan is easing him to the ground. The sounds of the dance filter to them through the garden, and Dean can see the faint glow of lights from that direction, but here they’re secluded and he feels no shame when Keelan unwraps him and positions him on his hands and knees.

Every savoring feels different in its own way, and while Dean’s body responds enthusiastically to them all, he doesn’t know whether he always enjoys serving his lord like this. The knowledge leaves a secret, guilty flush across his body—Keelan deserves better, he knows, and he always vows to try harder next time. Tonight is one of those uncertain savorings, though, when Keelan’s hand feels too heavy and restrictive, and his kisses make Dean’s muscles twitch.

Dean tilts his head up so that he can see the night sky, and the bush with its moths, and tries to let his mind drift away through the muted strains of music.

Keelan’s hand runs up from the small of his back to the place between his shoulder blades, fingertips briefly brushing the base of his wings and sending an intimate shock through him. Dean moans, shifting his body so that they come into better alignment and then moaning again as pleasure floods him. Chuckling fondly, Keelan trails his hand higher, to the nape of Dean’s neck.

A moment later, something that feels like ice spills over his throat and Dean gasps. His wings flutter madly as he digs his fingers into the soft loam of the earth.

“Shh, Uaithne,” Keelan tells him, coming to rest deep within him and holding him close with a hand low on his stomach. His lord’s other hand is moving on his neck, doing something with the living ice encircling his throat—no, not ice after all, but a metal necklace of some sort, and already warming.

Dean thinks that the weight of ornament is familiar, but the length is all wrong—this necklace is far too short when Keelan’s done fastening it: a thin, close circle that hugs his neck. It’s a new sensation to focus on as Keelan returns to savoring him, as Keelan’s hand finds his manhood and Keelan’s mouth finds his ear to whisper honeyed endearments there.

After, when it’s over, Keelan doesn’t hold him close the way he normally does. Instead, he stands and brings Dean, still lethargic from the thick burst of pleasure that always comes to him in the last moments of savoring, with him. The pool Keelan leads them to is still and mirror-like, reflecting back the heavy, pregnant moon and the glittering stars. When Keelan’s hands gently urge Dean to look into the mirrored depths, he finds a stranger looking back, wild and lovely.

There’s a spider web-thin chain around his throat, hugging his skin. Some soft, faintly glowing color that isn’t quite silver or white but a combination of both—the color of starlight. There’s a faint mist lying over the chain, rippling restlessly as though stirred by a breeze.

“Do you like it?” Keelan asks, caressing his hair and placing a kiss on top of his left shoulder.

“It’s beautiful,” Dean answers, because it’s the only thing he knows for sure about it. That it is lovely. 'Like' is another, more complicated question.

“I wove it from wind and starlight,” Keelan explains, and then moves to kneel at the side of the pool. “Watch, love.”

He reaches into the water, scooping up a pinpoint of reflected light and bringing it out of the pool. When he lets the water run out between his fingers a moment later, the star remains, pulsing faintly in Keelan’s palm. Dean watches, entranced, as his lord adds another and another, fashioning them into a long, shimmering line. And then Keelan calls the winds, which come at his command and twine about the line, covering it with that same, shifting mist that coats the chain at Dean’s throat.

“There,” Keelan says, standing and fastening the new chain to the first.

Dean shies away when he realizes what the necklace has become—collar and leash, not ornament at all—but Keelan’s hand on the lead halts him.

“Shh,” Keelan soothes, using the leash to pull him close again.

It seems to Dean that a chain so thin should snap easily, but he’s leaning backwards with all his weight and it doesn’t.

“Shh,” Keelan repeats. “Easy, love.”

And then he’s touching Dean again, in a way that might lead to savoring but which Dean thinks is just Keelan loving him: a lesser enjoyment. Keelan touches him everywhere, and kisses him, and breathes that name that’s almost starting to feel like his, until the moon sets and day brings the twin suns again.

When Keelan uses the chain to lead Dean back inside to their bed, it doesn’t occur to him to mind.


	16. Earth

“How much for the pet?”

Keelan’s fingers still where they’re scratching along the line of Dean’s jaw and Dean opens his eyes to glance up at his lord. Keelan isn’t looking at him: is frowning at his pale, black-haired and bearded guest. The guest, whose name Dean hasn’t yet learned, is watching Dean. His eyes are dark and hot, like cooling coals. His fingers—soot smudged—work against his thigh. He’s wearing a crown, same as Keelan, but his crown is made of silver and gold and precious stones. Keelan’s is woven from flowers and green, living things. Dean helped his lord make it himself.

“He’s not a pet,” Keelan says finally.

The guest shrugs casually and shifts his gaze up to Keelan’s face. “The question stands.”

Keelan’s hand falls away from Dean’s skin, but before Dean can mourn the lack of contact, there’s a commanding tug on the shining leash around his neck. He rises gratefully and climbs into Keelan’s lap, tilting his face into his lord’s worshipful hands. Keelan smiles at him, soft and fond, and Dean turns his face to the side and kisses the tips of Keelan’s fingers. His wings move lazily behind him.

“You’re mine, aren’t you, Uaithne? My love?”

“Yes,” Dean breathes.

“You know I would never sell you for any price.”

Dean does. He nods confidently, and then follows the guiding touch of his lord’s hands to settle more firmly over his lap. Once Dean is comfortable, Keelan slides a hand into the loose, white pants he dressed Dean in for tonight’s feast. Dean gasps and undulates his hips as his lord’s fingers find his manhood, rocking into the gentle pressure.

Once, he would have been embarrassed if Keelan had chosen to pleasure him in such a public place, but now it fills him with pride. Such tangible proof of ownership and love.

“Surely there must be something I can offer. A sword, forged in dragon’s breath.”

“He’s my consort, Druesar,” Keelan replies, stroking Dean more firmly. Dean rounds his back, letting his head drop forward and resting his forehead against Keelan’s shoulder as he moves his hips. “You could offer to craft a second _Skídbladnir_ for me and the answer would still be no.”

“He’s that good?” the guest asks. A hand brushes the edge of one of Dean’s wings—rough fingertips, blunted and coarse and warm: a smith’s hands—and although every instinct is yelling for him to be soft and submissive for Keelan’s touch, Dean can’t help jerking away. He isn’t for others to touch. Keelan made that quite clear.

Dean opens his mouth to explain the fault, but shuts it just as quickly: he can tell from Keelan’s expression that his lord already comprehends.

“No one touches my consort without my permission, _duergar_.”

“He doesn’t look claimed to me, _álfr_.”

There’s an insult in that response, Dean is almost sure of it. He’s made certain by the fierce grin on Keelan’s face—the grin broad enough to show all of Keelan’s pointed teeth—and by the simmering challenge in Keelan’s eyes.

“I will show you just how claimed he is,” Keelan vows. He pulls his hand from Dean’s pants hastily, almost angrily, but Dean isn’t worried because when Keelan’s gaze turns to him it’s just as soft and worshipful as always.

“Go dress in your clothing for the parting feast and then return to me here.” Reaching up, he unhooks the lead but leaves Dean’s collar in place.

Dean kisses his lord in parting and then obediently hurries through the crowds of dwarves and gnomes and kobolds _(and goblins, terrifying and twisted)_ that have assembled for this trading conference and races up the steps to their bedroom.

He needs help getting into the robes—getting them over his wings, doing the ties and ribbons and buckles right, making the folds fall just so—but the enchanted vines that cover the walls are more than skilled enough to do the work. For all the effort it takes to put the clothing on, when it’s done Dean is surprisingly undressed.

There are silver buckles across his chest, adorned with precious jade and emerald and lapis lazuli. A gauzy hood of midnight blue covers his head and most of his face, and the fabric it’s attached to drapes down behind him like a cape. The length of cloth moves continuously without the faintest hint of air, woven as it is from the night winds and the spinnings of moths.

Beneath those outer layers, a length of black cloth has been wrapped around his waist and fastened with a knot by one hip. The fabric falls along the outside of both legs from hip to knee, then climbs sharply across both inner thighs, leaving his front bare except for a single, loincloth-like fall of cloth maintaining at least a hint of modesty. Silver bucklers are fastened around his upper thighs, glinting as he moves. More bands of silver encircle his biceps—fashioned from the same, drifting metal that encircles his throat.

And then, finally, there’s the paint. Powdered shadow smudges for his eyes, silver moon dust for his skin, the juice of night roses for his lips. It’s part of the outfit, as Keelan designed it, and Dean makes sure everything is in place before hurrying back to reclaim his place by his lord’s side.

The banqueting hall has changed—the main dais raised up and draped with softest lengths of blue and silver cloth. Keelan stands beside a marble altar, and as he extends a hand in Dean’s direction, the crowd between them flows back like water. Entranced by how lovely and commanding his lord looks standing there, Dean tugs the hood down further over his face, the way it should be, and makes his way forward. With his vision cut off, he gets only glimpses of bodies—sometimes a kobold’s face, sometimes a gnome’s.

Keelan’s voice continues to wash over him, soothing as sunlight.

“I had planned to share this with you on the final eve of this assembly, but it has been brought to my attention that I have been an unkind host in not sharing my joy with you as soon as possible.”

Dean is at the base of the dais now, and he tilts his head back awkwardly to see Keelan gesturing him closer. The steps up to his lord’s side seem to fly past, and then Dean is standing in the pool of lights as well, proud to be so near Keelan’s perfection.

Keelan steps behind him, guiding him to stand facing outward with a gentle nudge, and then lowers the hood back from Dean’s head, revealing his face. For some reason, there is a sudden, low murmuring among the gathered crowd.

“This is my chosen consort, Uaithne,” Keelan announces. “He is called mine, marked mine, claimed mine. Bear witness.”

Keelan steps around in front of Dean, slowly, and reaches for the knot at his waist. Everything feels more serious than Dean is comfortable with, and he catches his lord’s wrist before Keelan can do more than brush the black fabric. This time, when Keelan glances at him, there is nothing kind or patient in his gaze.

“You will submit to me now,” Keelan says in a harsh whisper. “You will be gentle and soft and obey, as a royal consort should. Now remove your hand from my wrist and do as I’ve taught you.”

Shamed by his lord’s obvious disapproval, Dean releases Keelan and stands still while his lord unties the knot and unwinds the cloth. There’s more murmuring as Dean’s manhood is revealed to the crowd, and although he flushes—he’s never been naked before this great a throng before—Dean does his best to make Keelan happy and proud of him and doesn’t move. His stomach gives a relieved little flutter when Keelan rewards him with a secretive, fleeting smile as he discards the cloth on the floor.

“Would you be owned by me?” Keelan asks. His voice rings, carrying to all corners of the hall, and Dean senses that this is more than a question. This is Keelan asking for a vow.

“Yes,” he answers without hesitation, and his chest pulses gratefully as Keelan reattaches the lead to his collar.

“Would you give pleasure to me, and receive pleasure in return?”

“Yes,” Dean says—a sigh this time, because Keelan’s fingertips are playing over the head of his manhood and making it rise.

“Would you love me, and be beloved?”

“Yes.”

A kiss this time, to seal his promise: deep and filled with the endless reaches of sun and night both.

“Would you be consort, now and always, and cleave to me above all others?”

There’s a moment of hesitation—so fleeting that Dean barely notices it himself—and then he says, “Yes, Keelan. I want to be yours.”

Keelan’s smile relaxes into something playful at that and he draws them both back to the altar. “Then pleasure me, love,” he says as Dean’s back touches the stone.

It’s silent around them while Dean does as Keelan asks, and the brilliance of the illumination on the dais also helps Dean put their audience from his mind. For a time, he loses them completely and it’s just him and Keelan, allowing Dean to be pliant and giving the way Keelan taught him to be—eager without being demanding.

“So responsive,” Keelan breathes in Dean’s ear as his fingers rub over the tight nipples on Dean’s chest.

Dean is on his hands and knees now—was on his back to begin, then his stomach, and now here. He understands that Keelan is showing him off and isn’t sure whether it’s pride or embarrassment making his head spin and his skin flush. All he knows is that Keelan keeps pleasuring him with little sips and tastes, always pulling back just before that final, warm crest that would complete the savoring.

Dean’s skin is on fire: all of his nerve endings tingling with want and need. He’s covered with sweat, sparkling beneath the lights now because of the glittering silver dusting that was part of his costume. He moans, loud and wanton, as Keelan moves inside him with little, teasing thrusts.

“Please,” he whispers. “Keelan, please.”

But instead, Keelan’s hands leave his hips—Keelan’s manhood slips away from him, leaving him empty and alone—and he whimpers desperately. When Keelan leans in, it takes all of Dean’s self-restraint not to clutch and grab.

“Finish pleasuring yourself and I will savor you fully,” Keelan promises with a murmur.

This time, Dean’s flush is all embarrassment—he’s never done that for any but Keelan before, has never been so put on display—but Keelan asked and he doesn’t want to disappoint his lord. With trembling thighs, he kneels up and spreads his legs and wings in a way that he knows leaves his body open to watching eyes. Keelan showed him this position, teaching him how best to catch the light and avoid any shadows that might conceal what he’s doing.

Dean remembers his lessons now, moving his hands across his own chest and stomach first before dripping lower and just cupping the heavy weight of his manhood in one hand. He lifts it, draped on his palm and held out like an offering, and then fondles the sacs beneath. His heart flutters in his chest as the familiar feel of his hand on his own manhood sends shocks of pleasure through him, and despite the audience he’s a little more confident when he slides his hand closed around his length and begins to stroke.

When he has a rhythm going, Dean reaches behind himself with his other hand while kneeling up higher and stretching his thighs apart as far as they can go. It’s difficult to say whether the soft sighing sound that comes when he sinks two fingers inside of himself comes from his own lips or from the surrounding crowd.

On the inside, Dean finds himself warm and slick with the honeyed oils Keelan uses to ease the way, and as he rocks forward into his right hand and then back onto the fingers of his left, he imagines that it’s Keelan inside of him, Keelan savoring him.

His awareness of the crowd floats away as the shivery warmth of anticipation in his stomach strengthens. Dropping his mouth open on a gasp, Dean works himself harder and faster and then, finally, spills out onto the altar with a quiet, shaking sob.

There are approving murmurs from the darkness beyond the ring of light flooding the dais, reminding Dean of the audience he forgot, but he’s too exhausted to care. He sags, releasing his manhood and pulling his fingers free from his soft insides. Both hands are shaking as he drops forward and leans on them, panting, and lets the aftershocks run through him.

When Keelan grips Dean’s waist again, his hands are gentle. Despite his exhaustion, Dean arches into his lord’s touch, following the silent command in the pressure of Keelan’s fingers and shifting toward the edge of the altar. Dean blinks up at his lord, who is standing beside the altar and regarding Dean with proud warmth in his eyes, and then smiles and puts himself where he knows Keelan wants him: feet on the ground just before his lord’s, bent over the altar at the waist, arms and hands stretched out toward the far side of the stone surface in a languid sprawl.

“Beautiful,” Keelan praises, stroking his back and lazily fanning wings, and then pushes back in.

Dean moans helplessly as Keelan savors him, still too exhausted by his own climax to feel anything but lethargic, warm joy at how well he's pleasing his lord.

“You are decadent, love,” Keelan tells him with a quick nip to the back of his neck. “My precious Uaithne.”

Dean spreads his wings wide at the praise, chest expanding with a heavy, full warmth, and lifts his eyes from the stone in an absent glance.

Keelan’s royal guest stands at the base of the dais, frowning. Dean would think the dwarven king is offended by the show, but that isn’t anger in his dark, intent eyes. Dean’s own pride and joy in this savoring dampen, his insides going cold and frightened, and he turns his face away from the dwarf’s regard as Keelan spills with him. Shutting his eyes, he concentrates instead on the way that Keelan’s hands run across his spent body as his lord eases away.

The dwarves will be gone soon, Dean reminds himself, and their unsettling king will go with them. And Dean will stay here where he belongs. With Keelan, beloved and cherished and safe.

But he can still feel that heavy gaze on him.

Heated.

Dark.

Covetous.

And Dean shivers.


	17. Dust

“Burgers?”

Dean shrugs disinterestedly while looking around the motel room. It isn’t any dingier than the others they’ve stayed in over the years—it’s nicer, actually: Sam’s trying to counter the lingering effects of Faerie anyway he can—but Dean’s beginning to think that he could stay in the Ritz Carlton and still feel dirty. The real world just can’t compete with Keelan’s glamour.

“How about Chinese?” Sam offers. “I think I saw a place on our way in.”

Dean can hear the anxiety in his brother’s voice, but he can’t find it in himself to respond. He’s starving, stomach hollowed out and empty, but he already knows that whatever Sam brings back isn’t going to do anything about that, because it isn’t what he’s craving. It never will be.

“Dean,” Sam rasps, voice cracking under the strain of his emotions.

Dean glances over at that, thankful that Sam, at least, is as vivid as ever, and then looks away again. He doesn’t like watching Sam cry.

“Dean, please,” Sam begs. “I know—I know it’s hard, man, and you’re dealing with some serious shit, but you have to. Dean, you have to eat something.”

“Okay,” Dean agrees. “Bring me a burger.”

He isn’t going to eat it any more than he’s eaten any of the meals Sam has brought him over the last eight days—after the first couple of bites, he just can’t make himself choke down any more—and he knows that Sam understands that as well as he does. But Dean’s also expecting Sam to ignore the truth with the same persistent optimism he’s been showing ever since they left Faerie. He expects his brother to turn his face away from Dean’s dwindling strength and the gradual dulling of his wings.

The crash of the motel room table being upended takes Dean by surprise, and he flinches—wings fluttering several times before he recovers and stills them again.

“Damn it, Dean!” Sam yells. “You’re not even trying!”

Dean could explain to his brother—he could tell him that there isn’t any point in trying, now that all the light has gone out of his eyes. There’s no point when the world has been dulled, and everything seems covered by a thick layer of grime. There’s no point because he isn’t ever going to be the man he was before Keelan saw him and took him and changed him.

There’s no point when everything he puts in his mouth tastes like ash and dust.

So he sits there quietly, waiting for Sam to throw some more stuff around or get fed up with Dean and leave. He doesn’t think he’ll bother trying to stop him. He doesn’t think he’ll move from this spot unless forced to.

A moment later, though, Dean is taken by surprise for a second time when his brother steps in front of him instead, dropping to his knees and wrapping his arms around Dean’s waist. Sam’s forehead rests against Dean’s chest, and his breath wafts out in unsteady gusts against Dean’s bare skin—Dean never bothers with the bulky trench coat in the privacy of their motel rooms.

“Why won’t you try?” Sam whispers, desperately, and Dean is stung enough by the naked pain in his brother’s voice to run one hand through Sam’s hair. When Sam lifts his head, looking up at Dean with tear-blurred eyes, it’s instinct for Dean to lean down and press a chaste kiss to his brother’s brow.

He freezes there, lips slightly parted and eyes wide. His wings are trembling, his pulse racing. His stomach gives a fierce, aching pulse and his mouth waters.

Sam doesn’t taste like dust.

He tastes like nectar.


	18. Sight

Some days, it helps to catalogue the differences.

Sam is taller. His hair is darker. His mouth is wider.

Keelan was more graceful. His hands were more delicate. His smile was brighter.

Sam touches Dean with marked reluctance, even when Dean can see he wants to. He turns every savoring into a chore; some kind of task to be gotten over with and put behind them.

Keelan touched Dean like a cherished gift, never holding any of his desires back. Every one of his savorings was joyful and passionate; he never seemed to want to let Dean go.

Sam is coarse. He’s loud and frightening. At times, even the way he breathes seems to promise violence.

Keelan was courtly. His voice was a comforting murmur against Dean’s skin. Just sitting in the same room with him used to calm Dean; used to leave him sleepy and warm.

Sam is the only point of light in a drab world.

Keelan was the brightest star in a brilliant night sky.

Dean loves Sam, but he doesn’t understand him anymore. And it bothers him that he won’t ever be the man Sam seems to remember.

Dean loves Keelan, but Keelan is out of reach. And it bothers him that he can remember—dimly—the kind of man he used to be before Keelan claimed him.

Dean hates Sam for stealing him back, and waking him up.

He hates Keelan for taking him away in the first place.

Sam hardly ever looks at him.

Keelan looked at him all the time.

But.

But the _way_ Sam looks at him, sometimes. When he thinks Dean isn’t looking.

Sometimes, Sam looks at Dean like a blind man who has just been gifted with sight and is watching his first sunrise. Sam looks at Dean like Dean is air and light and everything perfect. He looks at Dean like Sam’s the unworthy one, and Dean is too precious to be approached.

Keelan only ever looked at him like a possession. Fondly, yes, but not ... not with the kind of all-consuming devotion Sam seems capable of.

Some days, when Dean measures it all out in his head, it isn’t all that difficult to decide between them after all.


	19. Blood

They catch him at the boundary markers.

Dean isn’t even sure how he made it this far, but he suspects Keelan let him run to prove a point. Or maybe just because the hounds were feeling restless and needed to run.

They don’t actually pull him down, just circle around easily in front of him and stop him in a ring of white hides and bared, snarling teeth. Their ears are red, like blood, and the way they watch him as he casts his eyes around for some way to get past, to get out, makes him think that they’re laughing at him.

“Uaithne.”

Dean shudders at Keelan’s voice, hunching his aching shoulders and glancing back the way he came. He’s trembling the way he’s seen deer tremble when Keelan takes him on hunts.

“I’m disappointed in you, love. I thought you had learned by now that this is your home.”

But there’s something in Keelan’s eyes that tells Dean he didn’t think any such thing, and it gives Dean the courage to spit in his lord’s face.

There’s a moment of shocked silence—even Dean is shocked he dared to do something so rebellious—and then Keelan has hold of his arm and is dragging him back toward the castle, the hounds bounding all around and after them.

“Know that I do this against my will,” Keelan says, and he sounds furious but also honestly regretful, which makes Dean’s insides go cold.

“I’m sorry,” he babbles, trying to pull his arm free not so that he can run but so that he can kneel at his lord’s feet to beg forgiveness. “I’ll be good, I’m sorry.”

“Too late, love,” Keelan tells him. “Now hush.”

Dean does, well aware that pleading more is only going to make things worse, and tries to keep up as Keelan leads him back inside and ... not up, back to their quarters, but down. Down deep where it smells like mold and age and something else Dean doesn’t like at all. There are vines growing down here in the dark, and they twist as Keelan drags Dean past. They reach out and lick at his skin, drawing frightened little noises from his throat.

For once, Keelan doesn’t comfort him. Keelan might as well be made of stone as he forces Dean into a small, dark chamber and shoves him face-first against the wall. There are more vines here, twining around his wrists and ankles and holding him fast. He whimpers at the restraint, trying to twist his head around enough to see what Keelan is doing, and then whimpers as he feels the vines sink into his flesh. Blood runs out, down his forearms and onto his bare feet.

“Know that I will weep rivers for every pain I cause you, Uaithne,” Keelan says from behind him, “But this is for your own good, and I will do it again if you continue to show me such disrespect.”

“I’m sorry,” Dean gasps, hands opening and closing helplessly. “Please, make them stop. I’ll be good. Keelan, Lord, I’ll be good. I won’t try to run again.”

Keelan laughs behind him, clear and cold like ice water. “I haven’t begun yet, love. The vines are just to hold you still so that I don’t damage you more than I mean to. This is for you.”

Something cold trails over Dean’s shoulder, down across his chest where he can see it if he cranes his head. He does so and then wants to take the look back, doesn’t want to know. But he can’t unsee the whip—nine long tendrils studded with thorns as large as his thumb and as sharp as Keelan’s hunting knife. As Keelan drags the whip back, one of the thorns catches Dean’s nipple and draws blood with a sting.

“No,” he moans. “I’ll be good. I’ll do whatever you want, please.”

“Twenty, Uaithne,” Keelan tells him, uncompromising. “Ten for trying to leave me and another ten for your continual disrespect. And you will thank me after or we can begin again. Do you understand?”

Dean wants to say no, to stall for more time—even a few more seconds—but Keelan would taste the lie. He’d know. And then it would be thirty lashes instead of twenty. Dean doesn’t remember what pain is like—the memory of his first savoring has faded and dulled with time—but he knows he wants as little of it as possible.

“Yes,” he chokes out, tears already running down his cheeks.

“Yes what?”

“Yes, love.”

“Good,” Keelan says. He sounds pleased. “You can scream if you want.”

Dean does scream. He screams as the whip slices into his back, laying him open to the bone in places and sending his blood rushing down his ass and thighs in hot, slick floods. Somewhere around number twelve he blacks out, sagging in the grip of the vines, and comes back cradled in Keelan’s arms. His back feels like meat, feels flayed, and the pain where Keelan supports him is unbearable, but he doesn’t flinch away.

“Am I done?” he whispers. “Is it over?”

Keelan hesitates, and Dean can tell that the answer is no. The answer is more pain, more of the lash. His eyes well with tears and overflow as his chest constricts. He thinks he’s going to throw up.

Then Keelan says, “Yes, love. It’s over.”

The ache in Dean’s chest intensifies until it almost drowns out the agony of his back, and he gets an arm up to fist Keelan’s soft shirt.

“Thank you, lord,” he says, choking on the magnitude of his gratitude and feverish at how loved he is. How loved he must be for Keelan to show such mercy.

“Shh,” Keelan soothes, lifting him. Dean stifles his pained cry by biting through his lower lip and presses his face against Keelan’s chest. He can hear blood dripping from his ruined back down onto the floor.

Keelan brings him back up to their bed and lays him down on his stomach. Keelan washes his back clean, and spreads soothing salves over his torn flesh, and bandages him. Keelan pours something that tastes like fire down his throat, and it leaves Dean feeling light and loose and completely separate from the pain.

“Don’t make me do that again,” Keelan begs, kissing his cheek.

Dean can’t manage words, but he nods as best he can. He won’t.

Oh God, he won't.


	20. Thirst

“Uaithne. Love.”

Dean cracks an eye and looks up at his lord. He’s bone weary, worn out from being savored for so many hours, but he’s also satisfied. Content. He isn’t sure he should be feeling like this—he remembers, dimly, how frightening and painful his first savoring was—but he can’t quite help himself. Keelan was so well pleased with him after the wind stopped, and gave such pleasure in return, that all Dean can do is offer his lord a weary little smile.

Keelan brushes his hand through Dean’s hair and down his cheek, holding out a crystal glass of pink liquid. “You must be thirsty,” he says.

Dean is, actually, now that Keelan mentions it. He sits up, wings fluttering absently behind him—those are a little alarming, but Keelan says he’ll get them under control—and takes the glass. It smells different than before—sweeter, almost intoxicating—and he breathes it in for a moment before raising it to his lips and drinking it down. It’s like drinking pleasure, and he moans a little at the honeyed taste, loves the way it clings to his tongue and throat when he swallows.

As soon as he can speak, he looks up at Keelan and asks, “More?”

Keelan’s smile is fond and indulgent as he fills the glass again and again, until Dean’s stomach feels uncomfortably full. He’s still thirsty, feels like he could drink a lake’s worth, but Keelan takes the cup away with a finality that leaves Dean feeling bereft.

“The thirst will ease,” Keelan says as he comes back to bed. His hands turn Dean onto his stomach and then trail over his wings in gentle, wondrous caresses.

“Please,” Dean breathes as the muscles in his back jump and leave the paper-thin, gossamer wings trembling.

“What do you need, love?”

Dean doesn’t actually know the answer to that, too awash in desires and thirsts and hungers that he doesn’t understand. Keelan seems to sense his confusion and moves to blanket him, savoring him while Dean lets out a breathy, shuddering moan. He stretches his wings out to the side, getting them out of the way, and feels a tiny pulse of pride when they obey.

“So beautiful, Uaithne,” Keelan praises as he rocks them gently together. “I knew you would be, but you have surpassed my expectations as the sun surpasses the moon.” His hands trace over Dean’s wings again, reverent.

“Tell me,” Dean begs. “Tell me again.”

“Tell you what?” Keelan asks, trailing the fingers of one hand around Dean’s hip and down to fondle his manhood.

“Tell me how you loved me.” Dean has heard the story before, many times, and has never cared for it. He thinks he might feel differently now, and even if he doesn't, he still needs distracting from the thirst burning in his body.

“I saw you through the veil of worlds,” Keelan answers, dragging out Dean’s savoring to a delicious, agonizingly slow pace. “I saw your eyes, Uaithne.”

“Green,” Dean moans. He knows they’re green. He’s seen them in the pool in the garden, and in Keelan’s looking glass.

“Green to put the hummingbird to shame, and the bright beetle, and summer grass,” Keelan whispers, kissing his neck. “I saw your face, lovelier than sunrise and the birth of spring. I saw your body, stronger than the stag and the mighty oak. And that was enough to ruin me for any other, but I saw your heart as well, Uaithne, and when I saw how pure you are, and true, and shining, something took hold of me.”

“A thirst,” Dean supplies, still far too keenly aware of his own.

“A thirst,” Keelan agrees. “I burned worse than you burn now, love, for need of you. And so I stole you, and I claimed you for my own. I wove enchantments and glamours to bind you here, and now your body has finally begun to accept my dominion.” He kisses Dean again—on the silken expanse of one wing this time.

Dean makes an effort and pushes them backwards, framing Keelan’s body, and feels his lord shudder. The moisture that spills inside of him quenches some of the fire in his veins. It eases his thirst.

When he feels Keelan pulling out and away, he groans in protest.

Keelan’s hand soothes across the small of his back immediately, settling him. “I would wrap myself in you always, but I have duties, my love. I must make arrangements with my stewards so that I can take care of you until your needs have eased. Can you be strong and wait for just a short while?”

Dean doesn’t want to wait—his throat is dry, his whole body seems to be crying out for moisture and the small amount Keelan just offered isn’t enough. But he isn’t a child, and he understands that Keelan is king here, and so he nods.

“I’ll leave you some nectar,” Keelan offers, placing a full pitcher of pink liquid by the bedside. “It should help soften the edges of your need while I’m away. Just be sure to sip slowly.”

Dean nods, sitting up while moving his wings in lazy motions. His lord pauses, resting a hand on Dean’s cheek and smiling down at him.

“My little butterfly,” Keelan murmurs, scratching beneath Dean’s jaw and enticing him into tilting his head for more of the caress. “I’ll have to bring some of that winged throng into the garden to ornament you on our strolls—although you’ll put them all to shame.”

Bending down, he presses a kiss to Dean’s lips—soft and fleeting—before turning away and leaving him alone with the parching thirst.

Dean is careful like he was told to be, and is still lapping at the last drops of the heady nectar when Keelan returns for him an hour later.

“All right, love,” Keelan calls as he shuts the door behind himself and drops his robe to the floor. “I’m all yours.”


	21. Air

There’s a flash of light and then a sudden rush of scents and sounds that make Dean’s stomach reel. Or maybe that’s all of the memories jostling around in his head: Hell—forty crimson-soaked years of torment—and then the War that followed. Being shoved aside to make room for Michael, his pathetic soul burnt by the proximity to the angel's Light, and he can't tell, now, which was worse: Michael's consuming burn against his insides or Alistair's corrupting touch on blood-slicked skin.

Either alone would be too much to handle, but the man _(Sam, his name is Sam, he's Dean's brother)_ touched Dean _(without permission, shouldn't touch, no one but Keelan is allowed)_ and ripped all of Keelan's _(lordbelovedmaster)_ forgetful enchantments away. Now all of the loss and pain and blood that used to be Dean's life is choking him, each sordid moment trying to force into him at once, and it's so incandescently, blindingly painful that it's a miracle his heart is still beating.

Worse than the memories is the man _(Winchester)_ mixed in with his fractured past—the man who has Dean's name but is strange and foreboding and frightening, and Dean just wants him to go away. He wants all of the screaming in his head to stop so that he can figure out what's going on and how to get back to Keelan's side where he belongs. But now that the demons have reawakened, they're impossible to silence, and the clamor is only getting louder by the second.

Dean lets out a helpless, keening sound and presses his hands to his ears as he bends forward at the waist. There's a faint hope that he can block everything out that way or, failing that, he'll at least be in the right position to throw up the way he wants _(needs)_ to.

“Dean," a muffled voice calls. A strong hand wraps around Dean's arm, hauling him upright. “Dean, it’s okay, we’re safe. We’re back.”

The sudden, deafening press of sound as Dean's hand is tugged from his ear jars through the overwhelming memories and makes Dean jump. New information flicker-flashes through his head, identifying the noise as a horn, and then he opens his eyes and gets another staggering rush of recognition. They're standing on the shoulder of a long black river _(highway)_ , populated with speeding, shining monsters _(cars)_ breathing smoke _(exhaust)_.

Dean hauls in a breath and the air tastes tainted. A foul mixture of oil, overheated metal and tar clings to his mouth and throat. He coughs the air out again, and then struggles to hold his breath as he turns and staggers away from the road and down a sharp incline toward the comforting silence of the forest.

“Dean, hey, wait.” It's that voice again—Sam’s voice—and the barrage of memories that accompany that identification are almost as bad as Hell. There’s too much emotion tangled up in them, too much longing and pain, and Dean can almost feel his ribs cracking open as his chest swells. He leans over a second time, clutching at his heart and fanning his wings, and hears more horns behind them.

 _Sooner rather than later,_ the Dean Winchester who doesn't belong in Dean's head anymore informs him, _someone's gonna stop to gawk at the freak. Then what're you gonna do, bitch?_

But before Dean is forced to come up with an answer, Sam swears behind him and something heavy drops down over Dean’s wings, crushing them against his back. He tries to jerk away and finds himself held fast, one of Sam’s hands around his waist and the other gripping his face.

“Dean,” Sam calls. “Dean, look at me. Look at me, man. You’ve got to calm down, okay?”

But no, it isn’t okay. Nothing about this place is okay. Nothing about it is right. Dean’s been here for less than a minute and he knows that much.

With a concentrated effort, he shakes free from Sam and dashes for the woods. When Sam calls after him, begging him to stop, Dean doesn’t slow.

His brother isn’t calling the right name.


	22. Sweat

Sometimes, Dean loses track of where he is.

He’s amazed the first time it happens, because everything here is so dingy and dull compared to the glimmer of Faerie. It should be simple to keep the two apart in his mind, but somehow, in that moment, it seems like the most impossible thing in the world. Because there’s that dull, dank reality around him, but there’s also a hot, warm body on top of his and a heavy, full feeling in his ass, and he’s been licking and nipping the flavor of nectar from Sam’s _(Keelan’s)_ body for what feels like hours.

And between one thrust and the next, everything tips over on itself.

Dean’s amazed enough that he doesn’t say anything, instead squeezing his eyes shut in thankfulness—he’s home, he’s whole—and clinging tighter to the body blanketing his as his lord ruts into him with hoarse grunts. He hooks his leg up higher, getting it around the jutting line of his lord’s hip, and gulps in the sweet, nectar-scented air while his wings tremble where they’re pinned to the bed beneath the weight of two bodies.

Reality reasserts itself when Dean tips his head back and there’s no answering nip of too-sharp teeth at his throat. His lord’s forehead is pressed against Dean’s shoulder, so he doesn’t see the offer, but Keelan never needed to see to know it was there. Keelan expected submission and surrender in every breath, and so he was never taken unaware when Dean offered it.

But Keelan isn’t here, and Dean feels shamed and confused as he realizes that it’s Sam on top of him, Sam’s big hands palming his shoulder blades where wing meets flesh and savoring him like a starving man. No, not savoring—Sam gives him unhappy looks when Dean calls it that—this is the real world, dull and ugly, and it isn’t anything but fucking here. Nothing but mating and, in some way Dean doesn’t quite understand, feeding.

Dean’s quiet and passive for the rest of it, but he doesn’t think Sam notices much of a difference. Not that Dean expects him to. After all, Dean has lost his taste for anything else. He remembers how to be aggressive, of course, and he’s given that to his brother once or twice, when Sam has seemed to need it, but it feels uncomfortable to demand. It’s awkward showing roughness when Keelan worked so patiently with him to teach him softness, and gentle acceptance.

It’s easier to turn his face away and let Sam take than to figure out whether he really wants to participate, or whether this is just about need. About chasing after an echo.

After, he doesn’t tell Sam what happened. It would only hurt him, and it isn’t as though Dean expects it to happen again.

Except for how it does, and this time Dean comes back only when Sam is calling his name and running calloused fingers through Dean’s hair. He blinks his eyes open, tearing at the disappointed ache in his chest when reality settles back in around him, and then hides by catching Sam’s mouth in a kiss. Sam closes his eyes when Dean does that, and Dean makes sure to keep his mouth eager and hungry until his own eyes are back under control.

After the third slip, Dean realizes that he needs to find a way to protect himself from falling into that illusion again. He tries letting his mind drift when Sam savors him, but that only makes him succumb faster and more deeply. He tries focusing on a single sensation—Sam’s mouth, or the girth of Sam’s manhood, or the squeeze and tug of Sam’s hand between his legs—but that doesn’t work either. It feels too good, which is what’s causing the problem in the first place, because Dean’s mind just can’t come around to connecting happiness and pleasure with this drab place.

And then, just when he thinks he’s going to be driven insane from the endless cycle of delusion and loss, he figures out how to keep this world and the other separate in his mind.

Sweat.

Keelan savored him for days at a time in Faerie. He pleasured Dean standing up and lying down and drifting in cool ponds and, once, wrapped in a swinging mess of flowering vines. And by the end of those pleasurable blurs, Dean would be a trembling, drenched mess, wings damp and shivering with exhaustion, while Keelan remained as immaculate and beautiful as he was when he first held out his hand.

So Keelan doesn’t sweat, but Sam does. Sam is slick within minutes after making a place for himself between Dean’s legs, and their bodies rub together with a frictionless, wet glide. Sam’s hair is damp as he pants and pumps into Dean. It beads moisture and drips onto Dean’s chest and throat and face. That taste, strong and salted and human, gets in Dean’s mouth and taints the nectar-sweet of Sam’s natural flavor.

It keeps Dean here, where Sam has taken him and where he’s supposed to belong, and Dean supposes he’s grateful for that.

He tries to be, anyway.


	23. Sound

Sometimes, Sam’s words are just so much sound.

“I’m not doing that to you,” Sam says when Dean kneels at his feet, mouth open for use.

But he does.

“We shouldn’t,” Sam says when Dean crawls into his bed at night. “God, Dean, _I_ shouldn’t.”

But Dean needs it, so they do.

“I’m sorry,” Sam whispers as he pushes into Dean, savoring him with strong, almost violent thrusts. “I’m so sorry.”

And from the tears that fall on his back like rain, Dean knows that this, at least, is the truth.


	24. Dirt

It feels like it’s been years since Dean has been permitted to walk alone in the garden, although he has an admittedly fractured conception of time as it passes here, in this place that runs from spring to summer to fall and then skims winter in the space of a single day and night. Or is sometimes all seasons at once, depending on Keelan’s whim.

Confusing or not, Dean loves to be outside in the open. He likes the feel the wind on his wings. Likes the soft feel of the grass beneath his feet. It’s one of the few places where he feels free, and as frightening as that sensation is, there are times when he needs it. Keelan’s ownership is both necessary and craved, but it can get ... a little intense, sometimes.

After a fortnight or more cooped up indoors while the dwarven delegation was visiting—Keelan needed Dean close, wanted to have him within arm’s reach while the castle was filled with so many strangers—the warm sunlight on his skin is a welcome release.

He hasn’t been out for more than an hour before he starts feeling antsy, though. It takes him a while to track down the source of his discomfort to the certainty that he’s failing in his duties by taking this time alone. Keelan needs him, after all. Keelan hasn’t gone so long without him for a long while; he must be wondering where Dean is. He must be wanting his Uaithne.

Biting his lower lip, Dean turns to start back toward his lord and then freezes, startled, as a squat figure steps out from behind a tree to his right. The figure’s limbs are twisted and knobby; its skin is the drab grey of gravel and stretched over bones like parchment. There were many of these creatures in Druesar’s train—goblins, Keelan called them.

“Hello?” Dean tries, fighting to push down his instinctive disgust and get a polite smile on his face. “Did you lose your way?”

Druesar just left yesterday, after all, so it is possible this goblin was accidentally left behind. Although it becomes a little less possible when there’s a rustling to Dean’s right and left and more of the creatures emerge from the underbrush.

He straightens, wings fanning the air as his heart speeds.

“Does Keelan know you’re here?” he asks, trying to sound stern.

“The question, I believe, is does Keelan know _you_ are here?”

Dean whirls around, heart lurching up into his throat at the unexpected voice, and finds himself face to face with a group of dwarves, Druesar at their head. Gone are the elaborate, costly-looking clothes. Gone is the crown. Instead, Druesar is dressed as shabbily as the rest, in clothes that were made for work or travel: coarse and sturdy.

He’s holding coils of silver chain in his gloved hands. The dwarves behind him have hammers in hand. Knives strapped to their belts.

Dean wasn’t supposed to talk to Druesar when he was visiting—Keelan made that quite clear when they were alone after Dean's claiming—and he doesn’t think that rule has been lifted now that the dwarf is supposed to be gone. But there’s no one else here to speak for him, and Dean is left feeling uncertain and frightened. Casting his eyes to the side, he looks for an opening in the crowd of goblins.

“So shy,” Druesar says, coming closer and driving Dean back a step. “What are you looking for, butterfly?”

“N-Nothing,” Dean stammers. His fingers flex nervously at his side, and he curls his wings in, trying to shield his body from the dwarven king’s hot eyes. “I have to go now.”

The goblins titter as though Dean made a jest and tumble in closer, making his chest pull tight in alarm. He jerks to one side reflexively and then moves the other way when he realizes that he has put himself within touching distance. Only they wouldn’t dare to touch him. Not without Keelan’s permission.

Would they?

“So soon?” Druesar asks. There’s a sly curl to his voice that Dean doesn’t like. He doesn’t like anything about this encounter, actually.

“Keelan’s waiting for me.” It isn’t precisely a lie. Surely Keelan has noticed he’s gone by now. Surely he’ll come looking for Dean at any moment.

But Druesar’s mouth spreads into a toothy grin. “He’ll be waiting for a while, I’m afraid,” he says, moving even closer and reaching out to drag a link of the chain against Dean’s forearm.

Dean flinches away, and his cheeks heat at the burst of laughter the movement provokes from the dwarves at Druesar’s back. “You’re not allowed to touch me!” he announces. He wants to move away but can’t, the goblins pulled tight in a solid ring around him.

Druesar’s grin widens as he strokes Dean with the chain a second time—his stomach this time.

“Don’t!” Dean blurts, beating at the dwarf with his wings while pushing the chain away with both hands.

The buffeting only drives Druesar back a step, which is not nearly far enough. Worse, now there’s anger flaring in the dwarf’s eyes instead of heated amusement.

Dean sucks in a single, panicked breath and then spins. Gathering his weight, he pushes off the ground and launches himself over the ring of goblins. The wind flutters against his wings and he has a moment to wish he could use them to fly the way the moths that keep him company at night do, before he comes back to earth, his feet colliding heavily as they absorb most of the shock of impact. He’s running immediately, sprinting back toward the castle as fast as he can move.

Druesar shouts a single word behind him, sharp and commanding, and less than four steps later Dean lets out a cry of his own as something collides with the back of his legs. He loses his balance and goes over, crashing heavily to the ground before tumbling to a stop. His ankle throbs, painful and hot where he twisted it, but he ignores the ache as he tries to get back up.

The goblin that knocked him over has been joined by others, though, and they swarm all over him: their clawed hands grasping at his skin and leaving thin, angry lines that bead blood. Dean’s heart is thundering in his chest and he can’t seem to get enough breath to scream. He thrashes, noiselessly panicked, and feels the hot sting of tears running down his cheeks.

“Careful,” Druesar calls. “I don’t want him marked up yet.”

 _Yet,_ Dean thinks, and makes a second, stronger bid for freedom. Thin as they are, though, the goblins are strong, and he’s slowly dragged back to the dwarven king’s feet.

“Hold him,” Druesar says, and Dean thinks he’s talking to the goblins until he feels something solid and cold wind around his ankles. The chain snakes itself up around his knees and thighs before launching itself higher to entangle his hands as well. Once it has him bound, the chains tighten, digging into his skin hard enough to bruise and allowing the goblins to release him and step back.

Dean twists his head, rubbing his cheek against the dirt, and squeezes his eyes shut. “Let go,” he pants breathlessly. “Let me go.”

“Keelan may have fooled all of those air-brained idiots at his court,” Druesar says, squatting down close to Dean’s head. “But he can’t fool another king.” He grips one of Dean’s nipples between two fingers and squeezes, sending a sharp, unexpected bolt of pain through Dean’s chest. He whimpers, bucking against the chains and Druesar’s cruel touch.

“Keelan!” he shouts as he finds his voice once more. “Keelan, help!”

“Quiet.”

Dean sucks in another breath for a louder scream and then chokes on it as the chain lashes up from his hands to snake between his teeth. His jaw is forced open wider as the chain wraps around his head, digging into the corners of his mouth. The taste of metal floods him, strong and earthen, where the links of chain trap his tongue against the bottom of his mouth. He gags on the metal and then coughs as drool trickles onto his lips before wetting his chin.

“If you were truly what Keelan claims,” Druesar says as he twists Dean’s nipple again and drives a hurt, wordless cry from him, “then the Gleipnir would not be able to touch you. Consorts are protected beneath the High King’s law. But you’re nothing but a pampered pet, aren't you?”

Dean’s eyes sting, more from the words than from the pain he’s in. He isn’t a pet. He’s _not_. Keelan loves him. Keelan—in front of everyone, Keelan claimed him. He belongs to Keelan.

“You haven’t been claimed yet, but don’t worry, I’ll fix that. Wouldn’t want someone coming after you and stealing you back, after all.”

Dean makes a wordless noise of denial, shaking his head, and then pants as Druesar gives his nipple one last pinch before releasing it.

“We aren’t so soft in Svartalfheim, little butterfly,” the dwarf announces as he drags his hand down Dean’s front—touching him everywhere, Keelan will be, he’ll be ... “You’d look very pretty wearing the marks of my ownership.”

Druesar bends close and whispers to Dean then, his voice low and intimate while the goblins and the other dwarves watch and laugh. Dean squirms against the ground, noting the way it seems to excite them even more but unable to help his feeble attempts to get away. The chain holds him fast, keeping him in place for Druesar’s wandering hands and his words—his promises of things Dean isn’t even sure he understands, but which terrify him nonetheless.

Promises that make him remember that day beneath the earth, when the vines bit into his skin and held him still for the lash, for the punishment he so rightly deserved. Keelan carried him up to their room afterward, but Dean senses that there won’t be anyone to rescue him from the earth if Druesar takes him now, won’t be any reprieves. Just the darkness, and the press of dirt, and mocking pain.

Dean is already crying plenty, but when Druesar tires of his games and rolls him over so he can grab one of Dean’s wings in a crushing grip, Dean screams. Tiny stones and bits of twigs in the grass scratch his cheek where his face is pressed against the earth. His tears come faster, mixing with mucus and tripping him into a coughing jag.

“These are going to have to go first, though,” he hears Druesar announce as he fights for control of his breath. “They’re too pretty to let them fade away once I’ve got you home. Besides, they’ll be a nice reminder of my victory over that _álfr_.” He pats Dean’s cheek and then climbs back to his feet before calling out, “Get to it.”

Dean’s eyes widen as he realizes what ‘it’ is: when one of Druesar’s dwarves kneels on the small of his back to keep him still and another takes hold of his wings in a firm grip. When a third dwarf actually starts to cut, sawing into the meat of Dean’s right shoulder, he screams again. He screams and screams for Keelan—for anyone.

But it’s long minutes before help comes—long minutes of agony as the iron blade slices through him, searing the flesh closed as it goes. Long minutes of understanding that he isn’t owned, that he isn’t safe, that he’s being taken away from Keelan and no one is going to do anything to stop it from happening.

Dean clings to consciousness, desperate to seize any chance to escape, and only allows the darkness to take him when he hears his lord’s battle cry ringing out through the woods around him.

 _Keelan_ , he thinks then, and drops into the black with a weary pulse of loving gratitude.


	25. Yearn

Sam wants his brother back.

It isn’t like when Dean was in Hell. Sam knew where Dean was then, as horrible as that truth might have been. He was desperate, and needy, and out of control, but it wasn’t this bad.

It isn’t like it was during the War, either, when the angels finally managed to take Dean away. Isn’t like all those brief glimpses Sam caught of his brother—the archangel Michael’s perfect vessel—as he led the charge. That was rage, and sorrow, and loss, and the horrible, creeping fear that Michael wouldn’t let go when it was all over.

But Dean came back from Hell and Michael _did_ let go, and things were going to be fine.

And now this.

Dean gone. Again. No trace or clue except the figure left behind in his place—in Dean’s bed, less than two feet from Sam’s. Stolen while Sam slept and replaced with a strange, life-sized figure woven from vines and branches and with two sparkling emeralds for eyes.

As though whatever took him can buy him from Sam. As though it can _bribe_ Dean away.

Sam should be used to losing his brother by now, but he isn’t. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to the emptiness inside his chest, which gets worse every time and has become some kind of black hole, pulling bits and pieces of himself in and irrevocably devouring them.

There’s a word for what Sam feels now, to describe all the futile anger and the loss and the raging, desperate need.

Yearning.

Sam yearns for his brother the way that a damned man might yearn for salvation—he yearns with a relentless determination that has sent him across the Atlantic, to Ireland, for answers. He’ll go further if need be. He’ll travel to Hell and beyond, if that’s what it takes.

And God help the son of a bitch who stole Dean this third time—last time, the very fucking last—because Sam’s going to find him. He’s going to find his brother and then he’s going to rip the thief apart, burn what’s left, and salt the ashes.

And then he’s binding Dean to him, anyway he can. Blood magic, black magic, Sam doesn’t give a shit. Just as long as it’s permanent, soul-deep, and as strong as the bones of the earth.


	26. Water

It was Dean’s idea, the hunt. He thought maybe it would help him remember how to be Sam’s Dean instead of Keelan’s Uaithne, and in many ways he was right. He can’t interview witnesses or sneak into morgues or doctor’s offices anymore—the oversized butterfly wings are a little conspicuous, not to mention the effect he has on mortals—but he can still go out for the kill, and he can help research on the internet or using the books Sam brings home.

In fact, things go wonderfully until they’re standing on the shore of Merrimac Lake beneath a full moon performing the banishing ritual Dean helped Sam dig up. Dean has his back to the lake, shirt off and wings unconsciously cupped to catch the night breezes as Sam lights the fire and starts to chant. He doesn’t realize anything’s wrong until Sam glances up and freezes mid-word, eyes widening.

And then it’s too late to do anything but start to glance over his shoulder before there are spindly, grasping hands closing around his legs and waist and arms and dragging him back and in.

The lake was shallow along the shore a moment ago, but things have slipped sideways the way they sometimes did in Faerie and when the water closes over Dean’s head he can’t feel the bottom. The grasping hands release him almost immediately as he flails about, and he whirls through the weight of the water, trying to find something to kick off back toward the surface. His feet glide through unimpeded liquid, finding nothing but cold, wet darkness.

When he opens his eyes, looking for the glow of the moon, he can’t tell which way is up. All ways seem the same here, in this suffocating place of shifting currents and diffuse light and slow, heavy movements. His jeans and shoes feel like lead, weighing him down, and he stops trying to locate the surface, kicking his sneakers free instead while fumbling at his buttons.

 _Pretty,_ a fluid, feminine voice burbles by his ear.

With one shoe off and the other dangling from his toes, Dean gives up on opening pants and spins around, eyes wide and searching. There’s only the water, spreading out endlessly on all sides and caging him in. His lungs are starting to feel tight and hot.

 _Who left such a beautiful creature unclaimed?_ comes another voice to his left. This one is masculine, and its owner is just as invisible when Dean jerks around. His heart hammers in his chest, the sound amplified by the crushing weight of water.

 _Ours now,_ chimes in a third voice, accompanied by a fleeting brush of something stringy and cold across Dean’s hip.

He jerks away from the contact, trying to swim through the water, and seaweed coils out of the depths, wrapping around his wrists and binding them together in front of him. As he struggles to snap the strands, more entangles his ankles. Bound, he floats in the cold, wet nothing shot through with aimless shafts of moonlight.

 _Finders keepers,_ singsongs the first voice, and this time when something caresses Dean’s stomach he sees a green, webbed hand. The hand is attached to a spindly arm, which is in turn attached to a creature with large, saucer eyes and drifting hair like an underwater spider web. It’s grinning, mouth gaping wide to show razor-sharp teeth, and Dean opens his own mouth to scream as other hands join the first—other creatures appearing from nowhere and pressing in close around him.

Water floods his mouth and nose, choking him, and he’s concerned enough with trying to cough the lake out again that he barely registers his pants and remaining shoe being torn away from him.

 _Air-child,_ one of the creatures—lorelai, Dean remembers Sam naming them: these are the lorelai—says as it grips one of Dean’s wings. The wings are useless now, soggy and crushed by the weight of the water, but it still hurts when the lorelai gives it an assessing tug.

 _No,_ another responds, taking hold of Dean’s other wing. _He’s ours now._

Dean can’t quite see what they’re doing, but he can feel something like liquid ice being spread over the wrinkled surface of his wings. The substance burns like acid, makes his wings feel like they’re withering from his shoulders, and why hasn’t he drowned yet? He keeps choking and choking without ever getting anywhere while the ice eats his wings from his body and he feels a scream bubble up from his chest and into his mouth.

The moon-suffused water swallows up the sound.

 _Shh,_ one of the lorelai soothes, and a mouth covers his—wetter than water, clammy and filled with those sharp, shark’s teeth. Claiming. Possessing.

Dean thinks he might be crying, but water already covers his face so he can’t tell.

Then, unexpectedly, there’s a flare of light—like a supernova explosion—and it’s Sam. It’s Sam diving down through the water with an underwater flare clutched in one hand and a short, iron knife in the other. Dean sobs again—in relief this time—and bucks against the lorelai’s restraining holds, reaching his own bound hands for his brother.

The lorelai retreat before the fire, or maybe the iron, and then Sam is there, cutting through the seaweed ropes and dragging Dean back up the way he came.

When Dean’s head breaks the surface and he hauls in a gasp of air, for the first time the real world tastes sweet. It begins to dull again almost instantly, but he’s too terrified by his near-miss to care, and his heart gives a pathetic, grateful flutter as he tries to swim forward and feels his knees bump damp, sandy lake bottom.

Dean can’t thrash out onto the shore fast enough and doesn’t stop even then, desperate to get as far from the water as he can. He doesn’t make it far—just to the other side of Sam’s hastily abandoned fire—before collapsing and burying his face in the sand.

“Dean,” Sam pants, splashing out of the water after him. “Dean, man, are you all—Jesus Christ, your _wings_.”

Dean didn’t feel them a moment ago—he was too busy being happy he was away from that wet, suffocating tomb—but he feels them now, burning and twitching uncontrollably. He turns his head, still coughing up brackish lake water, and then closes his eyes against the sight of his wings shriveled and burnt behind him. They’ve been eaten through in some places, leaving them tattered as well, and as Dean tries to crawl a little further from the lake one of them gives a final spasm and then goes limp and unresponsive.

“Shit,” Sam swears, and he sounds panicked enough that Dean can’t quite reconcile this brother with the one who spent so much energy trying to find a way to get rid of the wings when they first returned. But Dean guesses this isn’t one of the ways Sam had in mind, with Dean shaking against the ground and moaning in agony between coughs. He’s sweating beneath all the excess water dripping from his skin and hair: burning up with fever.

“Hang on.” Sam sounds closer, and his approach kicks sand up against Dean’s side, but Dean’s past caring. “This is gonna hurt, man.”

Having his wing grabbed does hurt. It hurts even more when Sam starts cutting, slicing the ruined outer edges off with an iron blade. Dean screams, writhing weakly, but Sam kneels between his shoulder blades to keep him still and keeps going.

“I’m sorry!” his brother apologizes as he drops Dean’s first wing and starts in on the second. “But it’s eating through them and I have to—I have to get the contaminated bits—there!”

Dean shakes his head, eyes squeezed tightly shut and hands curled into fists inside the sand, and as his brother releases his second wing, the world finally, thankfully, goes away for a while.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

It takes a little over three feverish weeks, but Dean’s wings heal. The ruined, amputated ends regenerate and the faded color deepens. Eventually, he has nothing to show for his encounter with the lorelai except an assortment of waking nightmares and cold sweats.

“What did they want?” Sam asks every day, and all Dean can do is silently shake his head, because he doesn’t want to think about that dark place beneath the surface. He doesn’t want to remember their grasping hands, or the pain in his wings, or how familiar it all was, because it happened before, it happened even under Keelan’s watch. Those covetous eyes. Those grasping hands. Pain.

Dean isn’t ever going to watch Snow White again.

Sam gives Dean another week after he’s healed to rest and then, grimly, announces, “If you aren’t going to tell me, then we’re talking to someone that will.”

No choices, no options, no reprieves.

Dean looks at the water beading on his skin in the shower that night, remembering hair like webs spreading out in a halo and tangling in his fingers. The sharp press of teeth against his lips. He remembers the lorelai _(and, beyond that, the dwarves, which weren’t anything like the Disney version)_ and trembles.


	27. Fire

Dean waits as long as he can.

In part, it’s because he’s still holding out hope that Sam will find the solution he can’t picture. Sam will find some way to keep Dean here; a way to unite Dean’s heart with his body and his fractured, broken mind. But as much as Sam and Bobby research, they’re no match for the power of Faerie, and it’s becoming clearer and clearer with each day.

Finally, when Dean wakes up one morning and finds miniature handprints in the frost covering his window, he knows his time is up.

In an effort to leave at least one good memory behind him, he spends that day being as attentive and loving as he can with his brother. It makes Bobby uncomfortable—Dean's known that since they first came here—but Sam has gotten over his own awkwardness throughout the last month or so.

When Dean moves in close, folding his body against his brother's—when he nuzzles playfully at Sam's cheek—Sam doesn't pull away. Instead, he wraps an arm around Dean and holds him near. He offers Dean smiles and kind words while Bobby looks the other way with a stiff, uncompromising jaw.

When it comes time for his savoring, Dean is even more enthusiastic than normal. He licks Sam to fullness, then drinks him down before suckling him back to readiness again. He whispers endearments as he lets Sam inside his body, wraps his legs around Sam's waist and moans.

Afterwards, when Sam is holding Dean close against his chest, Dean is pleased to see that the shadows left in his brother's eyes by those endless, burning hours in the iron room have finally lifted. He's been chasing them away as best as he was able—Sam was only trying to help; even at his most despairing, painful moments Dean understood that—but until today nothing seemed to be working.

It eases some of Dean's sorrow to know that he's accomplished that much, at least. Helps to think he's leaving Sam in such a peaceful, happy place.

Maybe, he thinks as he rests his head against his brother's slick chest, he'll be allowed to keep this one memory for himself as well. It'll hurt—way down deep inside his chest where no amount of grimacing or rubbing can ease the ache—but he's willing to endure that, as long as it means he doesn't have to lose Sam again.

He waits until Sam is asleep. Bobby takes a few more hours to drop off—Dean can hear him puttering around downstairs over the reassuring murmur of his brother's heartbeat against his ear—and an hour after that, Dean slips out of bed. He pulls on a loose pair of sweats and then, with one last, lingering glance at Sam, eases out of the room.

The house is still and quiet in the late reaches of the night, and as he moves toward the front door, Dean trails his fingers over the surface of a world that seems just as dull and worthless as it did the day Sam dragged him from Faerie. Thanks to Sam's research, he has a name to put to his condition now, but that doesn't make the Languor any easier to bear. The only bright thing in this world for him is upstairs, asleep and unaware, and although Dean thinks he might be willing to stay for his brother, he isn't being given the chance.

So he lets himself out the front door and starts walking.

Dean keeps seeing movement from the corner of his eyes—little flickers of light that tell him he's being watched, that he's being _hunted_ —and he knows that he won’t be able to get far on his own. Luckily, the place he wants _isn’t_ far—Hot Spring Spas is just downtown on West 41st Street. Dean noticed it from the Impala’s window as Sam was driving them in. He supposes that spas can house water fey as easily as the kingdom he’s after, but something deep and instinctive in his gut tells him that there aren't any undines waiting for him there.

Anyway, if he’s wrong, it won’t matter much. None of Druesar's people will be waiting for him by that much water, and now that Dean has made his decision, that's all that he really cares about.

Keelan can take him back or the water can have him, but he isn’t going to be dragged underground. He'd seal himself up in an iron tomb first.

Putting those dark thoughts from his mind, Dean breaks the store window and climbs in through the hole, careful not to cut himself on the glass. There’s a blinking red light by the door—a silent alarm summoning the police—but Dean ignores it. One way or another, he'll be gone before the mortal authorities get here.

With his heart thundering, Dean moves deeper into the darkened store. He turns on the display models as he goes, stirring up bubbles and letting loose a rush of heat into the air.

He’s at the third model when he hears the first hiss from behind him.

Turning slowly, Dean watches as the steam from the first tub swirls and solidifies into the shape of a lizard clinging to the plastic rim. Another joins it a moment later, and then another. All of them peer up at Dean with eyes like embers and flick out red tongues of flame that crackle in the air.

“I, uh,” Dean stammers, and then, blushing, comes to a reluctant halt.

It shouldn’t be so hard to get the words out, now that his decision has been made. Shouldn’t make his insides twist so much.

But it does.

He kneels anyway, head bowed and wings spread out behind him, and whispers, “I seek audience with your king.”

Dean forces himself to hold still as the salamanders crawl closer. Lets one flaming tongue lick out across the back of his hand. When the fey begin to clamber over him, he expects to be burnt, but the heat isn’t actually worse than the air on a humid summer day. Dean feels flushed, and a little faint, but as badly as his vision swims it doesn’t actually hurt.

And then, between one hazy moment and the next, the display room is gone and Dean is kneeling on rock instead. The air here is difficult to breathe, clogged with heat and steam, and the sweat that drips from Dean’s nose immediately evaporates when it hits glowing, vibrant stone. Heat bakes into his legs and leaves his muscles loose and weak.

“Well, well, well,” a feminine voice purrs. “This _is_ unexpected. Three Kingdoms of Faerie hunting you and you stroll right into my parlor. Bold move, butterfly.”

“Don’t call me that,” Dean says reflexively, and then bites his tongue as his own audacity hits him. He’s been with Sam too long, has forgotten his manners. He’ll be punished now, and God only knows how.

But the woman with the flame-colored hair who is seated before him only laughs. “So there's still a bit of spark left to you,” she says, kicking one leg up over the arm of her throne. “I was sure Keelan would have smoothed all those rough edges away by now. But perhaps your time in the wild has reminded you of old habits?”

Dean doesn’t know what to say to that—doesn’t know what she wants to hear—so he holds his tongue and says nothing.

After a few moments, the woman tilts her head to one side and purses her lips. “Well, there’s no arguing that you’re lovely. Although wings are so last season. You’d be much prettier with a few scales. And blue. Blue is just ... not your color, is it?”

Dean hates the tremors that take him—hates the fear he always feels when he’s looked at this way, like nothing but a piece of meat. Like prey. But although he can remember pushing that terror away before his time in Faerie, he hasn’t been able to regain the knack, and so he bows his head lower and sweeps one wing in front of his body, shielding himself.

The woman chuckles. “Still shy. An even greater marvel. Or did you relearn this from that mortal you’ve been trailing around after?”

Dean can’t help but glance up at that and the woman’s smile sharpens.

“Samuel is his name, I believe. Does he know you’re here?”

“No,” Dean whispers.

“Perhaps I should summon him as well. Then we three could—”

“No!” Dean blurts, more strongly, and his wing jerks back behind him where it belongs.

“Struck a nerve, did I?”

“Don’t go near him. Don’t—he isn’t part of this.”

The woman extends one graceful hand, allowing a stray salamander to nip at her fingers, and says with an idle tone, “I’m not sure I understand what ‘this’ is. Perhaps you’d better enlighten me.”

Now that the moment is before him, Dean isn’t sure what to say. He struggles with the words for a few seconds and then, finally, manages, “I want you to claim me.”

The fingers the woman was using to toy with the salamander still. “Interesting,” she murmurs. There’s another, drawn out moment, and then she stands and approaches.

Now that she’s closer, Dean can see that her hair doesn’t just look like fire: it is fire. Long, red and orange flames that lick over her shoulders restlessly. Her eyes are molten gold; her lips burnished and glowing. Her fingers aren’t tipped with nails at all but claws, and there’s a faint smattering of bronze-tinted scales marking the skin of her throat.

When she reaches for Dean, he holds himself very, very still and tries not to flinch.

“Why me?” she asks, tracing the line of his collarbone with one claw. “Don’t you want your Lord of Winds back?”

“If—if I’m going to be someone’s meat, I’m going to choose who,” Dean answers, and then hisses when the woman’s talon draws a searing line down the center of one wing.

“Very commendable,” she praises. “And certainly tempting. I haven’t had a consort in ages, and salamanders are all well and good, but I’m afraid they aren’t very good conversationalists.”

“Then we have a deal?”

Chuckling, the woman crouches before Dean and cups his chin. Dean winces as he feels his skin start to burn, but doesn’t pull away.

“You’re not in a position to bargain,” the woman informs him. “If I want you, I’ll take you. It’s as simple as that.” Her eyes flicker over his mouth and her own lips part sensually. “And you know, pet, I believe I do want.”

Dean shuts his eyes as she leans even closer, steeling himself for the pain he knows is coming. But something changes at the first brush of her mouth against his—there's an explosion of light, seen even through his closed eyelids, and a power that hooks deep inside his chest.

And then a horn’s clarion call and the tinkling of bells fill his ears as a wind comes out of nowhere and sweeps him away.


	28. Speak

Dean doesn’t ask how Sam’s planning on catching a fae. In fact, he takes it a step further and removes himself from the actual capture, only coming near after, when Sam calls with the all clear. Then he steps into the clearing, where there’s a small, fluttering figure hanging in midair over a circle of crosses fixed in the earth. Sam has a knife out—iron, Dean can sense it from here, like heat on his skin—and is pointing it at the tiny fae.

“You’ve seen him, now tell me how to undo it,” Sam growls.

But the fae ignores him, giving a bow midair in Dean’s direction instead. “The king misses you, Uaithne,” it greets him.

Dean’s skin pebbles at the sound of the name and he moves his wings with a sharp, instinctive jerk. He wants to tell the fae to go fuck itself, but just the sight of it is bringing everything back and his instinctual revulsion is already fading to longing. His limbs are becoming heavy with lassitude, and his mind feels lost in a starlit fog.

“That’s not his name,” Sam says. He steps to the side, getting between Dean and the fae, but it doesn’t dispel any of the memories wreathing Dean’s body and he moves his wings slowly through the air, caressing it.

“Neither is the name with which you would saddle him, mortal,” he hears the fae answer. “He doesn’t belong in your world anymore.”

“Maybe not, but he still belongs with me,” Sam states. The solid faith in his voice melts some of the dream-like daze clinging to Dean’s skin and he shakes himself before moving closer. He wants to feel Sam’s warmth. He needs the reassurance that Sam will protect and keep him, no matter how changed he is.

The movement puts the fae in his line of sight again, though, and it catches Dean’s eyes with its own—which are illuminated from within as though by moonlight—and says, “Come home, Uaithne.”

It’s Keelan’s voice. Keelan’s voice coming to him from this tiny creature, and snaring in Dean’s chest and making his heart beat faster.

Sam has gone stiff, likely caught too off-guard by the unexpected voice to react, and Dean finds himself drifting around his brother and toward the trapped fae.

“Keelan,” he murmurs.

“Ah, there you are, love,” Keelan answers, speaking through his vassal. “You are too beautiful to wander so far. Come back to me. I know you miss me. I know that you thirst for my touch.”

God help him, Dean does. Sometimes he thirsts for it so much he thinks he’s dying.

“No,” Sam gets out, grabbing Dean around the waist and pulling him close. “He’s mine. He chose me.”

The fae’s eyes flicker from Dean’s up to Sam’s and it smiles haughtily. “Perhaps he regrets that choice, now that he has seen what you have to offer.”

Sam’s body tenses against Dean, breath gusting out with a punched, pained sound. Dean wants to reassure his brother—wants to tell Sam that his touch makes Dean’s skin sing—but the taste of Keelan on the air is too strong for that.

Sam owns his heart, but Keelan owns his body and Dean isn’t sure anymore what his mind wants.

This is why he didn’t want to be here for this. This is why he pleaded desperately to be allowed to remain in the car.

He trembles, caught between conflicting desires, and then, with a soft moan, turns his face away from the fae and buries his nose against his brother’s neck. The scent of Sam—so sweet, almost like the nectar but not quite the same—calms him just enough to keep him where he is instead of ripping crosses from the ground in an effort to set Keelan free so that he can go home.

Sam’s hand comes up and tangles in his hair, keeping him close.

“Let him go,” he says—an order, which is disorienting because Dean can’t remember anyone ever daring to tell Keelan what to do.

“Even if I could take back the gifts I have given, I would not,” Keelan replies. “He is my love, my Uaithne, the light of my heart. And one day, when you have passed beneath the earth, he will return to my side.”

“Not if something else takes him first,” Sam snaps, and Dean shudders at the memory of the lorelai. Hair like seaweed, tangling his limbs. Arms pulling him down, tearing at his wings. Forcing water into his throat and burning him through. Those alien eyes, covetous and hungry.

Like the dwarves.

“Who tried to touch you, love?” Keelan demands, cultured voice sharpening. “Who _dared_?”

Dean knows he shouldn’t respond, but he’s used to obeying Keelan and he mumbles, “In the water ...”

“Dean,” Sam says before he can get any further. He sounds angry, but it’s the way that he turns and thrusts Dean away that really hurts. “Go wait in the car.”

It’s too late for that, though: Dean can’t leave while Keelan is here, speaking through his vassal. He can’t flee from the sound of his lord’s voice.

“You must return him to me,” Keelan urges. “I can keep him safe here.”

“Go fuck yourself, you thieving son of a bitch,” Sam spits, and then he does something with the knife—makes some kind of gesture—and Keelan’s presence is gone. It’s just Dean and Sam and the trapped fae, which looks a good deal less confident all of a sudden.

“H-how did you d-do that?” it stammers. “I-I can’t feel my king anymore. How did you—”

“You’d be surprised at what I can do,” Sam answers, stepping close to the ring of crosses and holding the iron blade at the fae’s throat. “Now, tell me what your king did to my brother.”

The fae stares at the knife with an ashen face for less than a second before gulping and answering, “He began to claim Uaithne as royal consort, but you interrupted the process before it was done.”

“His _name_ is Dean. Use it.”

“Dean, then,” the fae corrects itself immediately.

Sam gives a single nod, blade still extended. “Go on.”

“As I said, the claiming is incomplete, and so Uai—Dean remains trapped between your world and ours.”

“Which means what, exactly?”

“Like a fruit half-plucked from a tree, he remains ripe for any hand to claim—and make no mistake, he will be claimed whether you will it or no. He is too perfect to be left unsavored for long.”

Dean’s body flushes hot at the word—at the memories of what it means, all the ways Keelan touched him. He’s shamefully grateful that Sam is too focused on the fae to notice.

“My king will be gentle,” the fae continues. “He will see that your brother enjoys awakening to his new life, and will cherish him like the treasure he is. But he will not fare so well in other hands—or do you wish to see him debased and passed around from one lord to another as a tithing gift?”

“ _No one’s_ taking him,” Sam answers, “Because I’m going to undo it.”

The fae laughs, a sound like the wind rushing through the trees. It makes Dean a little homesick for Keelan’s kingdom.

“Fool,” the fae proclaims. “Teach the rivers to flow backwards, or the canyons of the earth to rebuild themselves. Teach the rain to fall up into the sky, and the winds to travel through solid rock. Teach the half-plucked fruit to reattach itself to the bough. Then, perhaps, you might accomplish your aim.”

Dean’s familiar enough with faerie-speak to know what those words mean—to recognize the faerie manner of talking about impossibilities, about nevers—and he drifts away while Sam asks increasingly angry questions. He knows that his brother believes the fae is just playing games and speaking in riddles, and that it will take Sam hours to understand what Dean has grasped in seconds.

He could speak up and enlighten Sam, but he wants to be alone right now. He wants to sit on the hood of the car and lean back against the sun-warmed metal: feel the light on his wings and the breeze on his upturned face.

He wants to consider his options in peace where Sam’s desires and needs can’t confuse him. He needs to quiet both body and heart and allow his mind time to speak.

Overhead, the wind moves through the leaves and mimics the sound of laughter.


	29. Sun

“I thought I might find you here.”

Dean lifts his head at the unexpected voice and the butterfly that was perched on the back of his hand takes off, flitting into the air to join the others. It’s thick with them here by the pool, which might be one of the reasons Dean feels almost comfortable, more at peace than he has anywhere in a long time.

Even if it is just him and a bunch of insects.

“Your majesty,” Dean murmurs, moving to rise, but a hand on his shoulder halts him.

“I have asked repeatedly that you call me Titania, Dean.”

“Titania,” Dean agrees, but he can’t look at her when he says it. He shouldn’t be saying her name. She shouldn’t be touching his shoulder so gently. Not something like him.

“Is it the butterflies or the sun?” Titania asks, sitting down on the grass next to him.

Dean slants a quick glance to his right—just enough to see the heart-stopping beauty of her face—and then looks away again, up into the butterfly-filled air. “Both, I think,” he answers as he dabbles his fingertips in the pool.

“There were butterflies when you were with Keelan?” Titania’s voice isn’t any less gentle, but there’s a new note there—the same one Dean always catches hints of whenever she asks him about his past. Some deep, lingering sorrow.

Uncomfortable with the thought that he’s responsible for someone so good and beautiful feeling that way, Dean shrugs one shoulder awkwardly and mumbles, “Moths in the garden.”

“And you liked it there, in your garden of moths?”

Dean gives another half-shrug and doesn’t answer. He’s not sure what to say.

After several minutes of sitting in silence, Titania asks, “You know why you're here, don’t you?”

She doesn’t mean by the pool.

“I was causing trouble,” Dean answers after a moment, recalling how furious Oberon's face was when he first saw it, when he was confused and blinking and wondering what in the world had happened to the flame-haired fey about to claim him and take him away from Sam forever.

“Not trouble, precisely, but ... a bit of a commotion, yes. It isn’t often that there’s a dispute over a consort, and I can’t remember a time when three Courts were vying for the same Faerie—let alone four for a half-breed.”

“I didn’t mean to be a problem,” Dean says, picking up a stray, white rock and tossing it into the pool. The ripples spread out, moving over the still, mirrored surface and breaking up the reflections of butterfly wings into jagged fragments of rainbows. “I just wanted it to be over.”

“You wanted what to be over?” Titania asks. Her voice is gentle—coaxing—but Dean shies away from the question with one of his shrugs.

A butterfly—maybe the one he was visiting with before she came, maybe a new companion—lights on his bare shoulder. He can feel its wings moving slowly, a tickle of air, and imagines the sensation into an offer of comfort. Even if his new friends aren't actually intelligent enough to understand what he needs.

"Did you miss Keelan?" Titania asks, a question no more idle than all the others that have been put to him since he was brought to the High Court. "Was it your exile from him that wounded you so?"

Dean thinks of agreeing, almost nods, and then hesitates as a second butterfly joins the first. If it had been Keelan he wanted, he would have stayed put instead of seeking out the Lady of Flame. Another few hours, and he would surely have been back in his lord's arms, no matter how much Sam struggled to keep him.

The realization is both disorienting and uncomfortable, and Dean frowns, tilting his face further away so that Titania won't be able to read the distress in his expression. She seems to know anyway—perhaps the same way she always knows when the empty pit in his chest grows too strong—and she draws him into her arms with the same, almost motherly insistence she did when she found him shaking in his chambers that first night.

"Shh," she breathes as he leans into her warmth _(shouldn't, knows he shouldn't but can't help himself)_. "Shh, _anwylyd_."

Dean sucks in a hitching breath and tries not to think about how much his chest hurts as he basks in the borrowed pity. He doesn't understand how someone like Titania can waste her time on something like him—he's just a half-breed, and a troublesome one at that—and it's aching, shamed gratitude more than anything else that has him mumbling his guilty secret into her shoulder.

"What was that?" she asks, running gentle fingers through his hair.

"Not belonging,” Dean repeats more clearly. "I don't belong anywhere, and I—I just wanted to find someplace. Where I wouldn't be a problem."

Titania's hand stiffens for a heartbeat before continuing to stroke. “Is that why you come here so often? Do you feel like you belong here?”

“Not—no. But it doesn’t seem to matter as much here.” Dean gestures at the butterflies with one wing without shifting away from Titania's arms. “They don’t care if I'm ...” He trails off, not sure what to call himself, and then lamely finishes, "Me."

Titania draws back at that, and when Dean casts an unwilling glance at her face, he almost thinks he sees tears in her eyes. But of course, that's silly. A great lady like Titania wouldn't waste something as precious as tears on him, no matter how kind she's been.

“My lord and I care very much about finding somewhere for you to belong,” Titania says now. Her hand finds his where Dean is resting it on the grass and Dean can't help flinching slightly. She doesn't seem to notice, lacing their fingers together and squeezing as she continues, “That’s why you have had to wait so long for a hearing since we summoned you from Tesni’s realm. We wished to allow all parties to speak their piece, to reach the heart of the matter. But they’re here now, Dean. Everyone is awaiting you in the Great Hall.”

Everyone.

Dean’s heart beats a little faster and his head comes up. His throat is cold and tight, the instinctive fear of punishment pushing everything else aside. The kindness of Titania’s beauty gives him the courage to whisper, “Please don’t give me to Druesar.”

The light in her eyes turns chill and pale like winter, and she disengages their hands as she gets to her feet. When she reaches for his face, caressing his cheek lightly, Dean shivers.

“That promise is not mine to make, but I will do what I can.”

“You’ll speak for me?” Dean pleads.

"No." But Titania's smile is a little warmer as she drops her hand back to her side and turns away, leaving him to scramble to his feet and trail obediently after. “You will speak for yourself.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

The Great Hall, which Dean has been hearing about ever since Titania and Oberon stole him out of the heart of the Fire Lady’s realm, but has not yet seen, turns out not to be a hall at all. Instead, it’s a double line of towering pines. There are twin thrones at one end of a grassy walk between the pines, both seemingly grown out of the ground in that form and covered with flowers.

Some of Oberon’s hounds are frolicking about the clearing, and Dean shies closer to Titania, remembering Keelan’s dogs. But when these hounds bark, they seem to laugh, and anyway they aren’t paying him any attention. Besides, as Dean gets closer to the crowd by the thrones, he sees that he has worse to fear.

Druesar is there with his dwarves. Tesni with her salamanders. Another woman wearing a cloak of water can’t be anyone but Aeronwy, Lady of the Waves. And there is Keelan, standing a little apart and watching Dean approach with hungry, familiar eyes.

For a moment, it’s all Dean can do not to go to his former lord and kneel at his feet. Nuzzle at Keelan’s manhood through his breeches in a silent plea for forgiveness. As though she can sense the urge, Titania puts an arm around Dean's waist and holds him close.

“Where are the others?” she asks.

Her lord, the High King Oberon, stirs where he’s seated in one of the two thrones before haughtily answering, “These are our people. They will speak first. After, we will hear from the Outsiders.”

“Then we shall stand here, while they speak,” Titania replies, drawing to a stop and halting Dean with her.

Oberon’s mouth quirks. “Perhaps you wish to keep the pet for your own? I will hear your claim, Lady.”

“My Lord will have his jests,” Titania says as she sinks down to the soft grass, drawing Dean along with her. “Come, Dean. Sit with me.”

All too conscious of the four pairs of hungry eyes tracing his every breath, Dean obeys and then curls close to Titania’s side in an attempt to hide the tremors running through his body. These past few weeks have been like a wonderful gift, providing him with the illusion of freedom. He’s been a little lonely—dreaming of Sam both waking and sleeping—but he was almost ... happy, here. Here, where no one made any demands of him except for conversation, and where no one offered him anything resembling violence.

But he always knew, deep down, that it couldn’t last.

Dean listens as they speak—Keelan first, and then Druesar, and Aeronwy, and Tesni. He imagines how it would be with each of them—easiest to picture with Keelan, whose touch he already knows, and Druesar, whose desires are all too easy to imagine. Hardest with the two women, both of them strangers to him and therefore unpredictable.

When Tesni finally falls silent, Oberon lifts his hand and intones, “I grant Entrance and Sight to the Hosts of Heaven, in accordance with the Treaty.”

The sweet sound of bells fills the air, and the sunlight turns even more golden, pouring into the clearing like honey. As Dean watches, wide-eyed, two of the beams condense into figures—one of them instantly familiar.

“Castiel,” he murmurs, sitting up straighter.

He didn’t expect to ever see the angel again, not after Sam explained about the veil that had been drawn between Angel and Fae after the Great Treaty. But here and now in the Great Hall, Oberon has bent the rules back upon themselves as perhaps only he or the Metatron could. Unexpectedly, Dean can see Castiel clear as day, and from the way Castiel is staring back at him, Dean is just as equally visible.

At the realization, Dean averts his eyes with a flush. He can't meet the angel's piercing, mournful gaze. He's too aware of how different he is now. Too ashamed of how easily he was gentled.

Instead, he looks at the other figure, and after a moment of shock realizes that he knows Castiel's companion as well. Actually, Dean knows him better than he knows Castiel. Better than he knows Sam.

“Michael,” he breathes, naming the nightmare, and shrinks back into Titania’s side. He wishes he had a butterfly's size as well as its wings, because he's too conspicuous like this—too vulnerable and exposed. His heart pounds as he remembers how it felt to be shoved aside by Michael's presence. How difficult it was to cling to sanity, like a reed buffeted by a tornado and lashed by hurricane lightning.

How very worthless and insignificant he was, with Michael's light pouring through him.

“Archangel,” Oberon says politely.

“Elf.”

Dean shudders at the sound of that voice, the one that used to echo through his bones, and Titania shushes him, petting his hair as he hides his face against her hair.

“You had first claim on the life in question. If you wish it, it is yours again.”

 _No,_ Dean thinks as cold shocks through him. _Oh please, no._ Anything but Michael. He’d rather be given to Druesar.

“Please,” he whispers, tugging on the hem of Titania's petal gown. “Don’t let him take me. _Please._ ”

“Hush,” Titania says absently, and Dean obeys, clenching his jaw and squeezing his eyes shut. He can feel Michael looking at him—Michael considering the offer, thinking about taking his body back again—and tastes the metallic zing of iron in his mouth. Panic mingling with despair.

Then Michael says, in a disinterested voice, “I have already relinquished my claim to this vessel.”

 _Ohthankyouthankyou._

There’s a beat of silence before Oberon replies, “Very well. Then I will retire to consider my decision.”

“Wait.”

Dean’s head comes up slightly at the sound of that familiar voice. This time, when he looks over at Castiel, the angel isn’t looking back at him. Instead, he’s stepping closer to Oberon. There’s no sign of Michael, gone now that he's finished casting Dean aside a second time.

“You have something to add, Angel?" Oberon asks with a wry twist of his mouth. "A claim of your own, perhaps?”

Dour as ever, Castiel refuses to be diverted. “There is another with a prior claim. Samuel Winchester.”

Dean’s heart races at the sound of his brother's name and his wings beat twice, sharp and uncontrollable. Titania shushes him again with a wordless, compelling command, and Dean settles with difficulty, keeping his eyes trained on Oberon’s haughty face.

“What, the human?” the High King says, sounding surprised. “Humans have no place in this discussion.”

“Sam Winchester is only half human,” Castiel corrects. “Like his brother, he is also a true vessel.”

One of Oberon’s eyebrows lifts at that. “And he would claim this one?”

“He doesn’t need to. Dean is already his. He was his even before Sam drew his first breath. They're soul mates—what your people would call a bonded pair. Your vassal stole what was not meant to be touched. ”

Castiel turns with the words to stare at Keelan, and Dean remembers that expression, vaguely, from Before. That's the same expression Castiel was wearing a moment before he reached out and smote Zachariah into a tiny pile of ash.

The clearing has gone completely and utterly silent. Even Dean can tell that his hearing has just taken a turn for the worse and his stomach twists into knots.

After a long, tense pause, Oberon says, “This is a grave accusation. Are you prepared to support it?”

“I am,” Castiel agrees. His eyes are still fixed on Keelan, as though daring him to speak.

And Keelan ... Dean has never seen Keelan like this before, drawn and pale and looking almost ill. He waits for the need to comfort his lord to rise within him and, surprisingly, it doesn't come.

From his throne, Oberon nods. “Then bring the mortal here.”

Castiel is gone in a flicker of light, without so much as a glance cast in Dean's direction. Now that the angel is gone, Dean senses some of the eyes of those assembled turn back toward him and hunches down again. Only Oberon and Keelan seem to be ignoring him, both staring at each other in wordless communication.

Then Oberon says, almost lazily, “You had better hope he’s lying, Keelan. You know the penalties for interfering with a bonded pair.”

“I knew of no prior claim when I took him, Lord,” Keelan answers, but his face is still pinched and fearful. There's a noticeably anxious tremor in his voice.

From the way Oberon’s mouth turns down into a frown, the High King isn't impressed by Keelan's response. “When you took him,” he repeats. For the first time, the power in his voice is unveiled: cold and pitiless and lashing. The steady weight of his eyes on Keelan is a threat.

“I ... found it difficult to consummate my claim,” Keelan stammers.

"That would explain our current dilemma, wouldn’t it?” Oberon responds. Then, leaning back in his throne, he turns his attention to Dean. There's a thoughtful purse to his lips: a kind of expectancy to his expression that makes Dean uncomfortable. Dean doesn't know what Oberon wants from him, but he's sure he'll disappoint the King. He doesn't want to be punished when he does.

Oberon is still watching Dean steadily when a flicker of light signifies Castiel’s return—this time with Sam at his side. Dean’s chest gives an expansive, aching pulse at the sight of his brother and he tries to rise, only to be tugged back down by Titania’s hand on his wrist.

“There’s protocol to be followed here,” she whispers in his ear. “Just be patient. Contrary to popular mortal belief, my lord does not have a heart of stone.”

But Sam has seen Dean as well now, and he doesn’t have anyone to hold him back.

“Dean!” Sam shouts, breaking into a run only to draw up short when the ground erupts at his feet.

Vines shoot through the thick grass, growing too quickly for Dean’s eyes to track. They thicken and twist around Sam until they form a cage, hemming him in and keeping him from coming any nearer. Dean's stomach lurches at the sight of the vines _(blood and the lash and wetslickpain)_ and he wants to warn Sam to stay away from them, but he can't get enough breath to form the words.

“Dean!” Sam yells again, more desperately, and grips one of the thick, green lengths in each hand. He's trying to pull them apart—trying to tear his cage open—and Dean is pathetically thankful that Oberon's vines have no thorns. Not like the ones currently twining through Dean's memory.

Of course, Sam's attempts to free himself are about as successful as Dean's were.

“Mortal!” Oberon barks from his seat. Then, as Sam ignores him in favor of trying to force his way through the bars of his living cage, he thunders, “Samuel Winchester!”

Sam starts to look behind him at the sound of his name, catches sight of Keelan as he turns his head, and then launches himself at the vines in a completely different direction. “You son of a bitch!” he snarls. “I’ll kill you! I swear to God!”

“Control your witness, Angel,” Oberon insists, pitching his voice loud enough to be heard over Sam’s shouts. “Or I’ll be forced to do so for you.”

Castiel is at Sam’s side in a heartbeat, reaching through the vines to catch his sleeve. He gets his mouth by Sam’s ear, speaking rapidly and softly, and gradually, Sam's struggles slow. He stops yelling but doesn't quiet, eyes still speaking volumes as he stares steadily in Keelan's direction.

“Better," Oberon praises. "Now, mortal, tell me. Does the consort in question belong to you?”

That gets Sam's attention—a cutting, sideways glance and a curl of his lips as he bites out, “His _name_ is Dean, and he’s no one’s consort.”

Dean's breath catches a little at Sam's audacity. He's both terrified by how Oberon will react and hesitantly proud of his brother's strength. Sam always has been braver than he thinks he is. It's just one of the reasons he shouldn't have to put up with Dean the way he has been.

Luckily, Oberon seems more amused than offended. Leaning back in his throne, he muses, “No, I suppose he isn’t yet." Then, with that sea-swift change of emotion Dean has become accustomed to in Faerie, he sobers and adds, "But that’s what this hearing is meant to decide, so I would advise you to answer the question. Is he yours?”

Sam blinks, like he was expecting anything but that question. Dean watches, breathless, as Oberon's words sink into his brother. He sees Sam understand what he's being asked. And Sam doesn't turn around. Sam continues to stare up at the High King, like Dean isn't there. Like he isn't worth looking at.

Dean's eyes water—Sam's going to deny him, of course he is. Sam has never wanted to own him; he's made that clear from the very first.

“Yes.”

It takes a moment for Dean to hear his brother's voice past the 'No' in his head. Even then he isn't sure whether to believe it, straightening with hesitant hope as his chest expands with each joyful beat of his heart.

 _Yes,_ he thinks. _Yes yes yesyesyesyes ..._

When Titania stands, she brings Dean with her, one hand cupped beneath his elbow. Dean rises with a weightless, dazed sensation, his wings spread behind him on a rush of elation. He takes a single, eager step forward before the sensation of eyes on him makes him remember his place. Stopping again, he starts to lean into Titania.

This time, instead of welcoming him near, she plants her hand in the small of Dean's back and gives him a tiny push forward.

“It’s time to speak for yourself, _anwylyd_ ,” she whispers as she falls back and leaves Dean to stand alone in the middle of the Great Hall.

His stomach squirms at the feel of all those eyes on him—some of them more covetous than he likes. His wings start to dip in protectively and then hesitate as he catches sight of his brother. Sam is looking at him now, pressed up against the side of his cage that brings him closest to Dean. He's clinging to the vines and staring at Dean like he can’t get any oxygen when they’re this far apart.

Dean knows how he feels.

“Tell me, half-breed,” Oberon’s voice booms out through the still air. “To whom do you belong?”

Sam shoots a quick, anxious glance in Keelan’s direction, and Dean wants to laugh. He wants to laugh because, now that both of them are in the same space, standing beneath the same sun, it isn’t even a contest. It never has been, really. Dean’s body was just too attuned to Keelan’s touch. His mind and heart were too lost beneath the crippling Languor to speak to him clearly.

But Faerie is all around Dean now, soothing the bitter, consuming longing in his chest, and his time in the human wilds have reminded him how to crave another touch—one not so practiced on his skin, but more genuine for the fumbling. There’s more emotion in the lightest trace of Sam’s fingertips than there ever was in Keelan’s most passionate embrace, and Dean is still human enough to know the value in that.

“Sam,” he whispers, and watches as his brother goes shock-still. Sam’s eyes seek his, sharp with hope and longing, and then start to tear as he takes in the certainty on Dean’s face.

Slowly, the vines unwind from around Sam, sinking back into the earth and leaving him free to move. He doesn’t seem to remember how to work his body, though; stuck standing there staring at Dean like a deeply rooted oak.

Secure in his newfound certainty, Dean moves for the both of them, closing the distance to fold himself against his brother’s chest. His wings are vibrating with excitement, but he manages to control them well enough to give one side of Sam’s face a quick, reassuring brush as he nuzzles his way beneath his brother's jaw and breathes in Sam's familiar, beloved scent.

“I’m Sam’s,” he repeats, softly but honestly.

“Yes, I think you are,” Oberon agrees, and then immediately continues, “Unfortunately, I can’t have a human owning one of my people—even a half-breed.”

Dean doesn’t even have a chance to stiffen in protest before Sam jerks in his arms, crying out in clear agony.

“Sam!” he yells. Panic springs to his mouth, hot and metallic, as he catches his brother. Dean holds Sam upright as his brother shakes, and shoots a terrified glance up at the High King. “What are you doing to him? Stop it!”

“Peace,” Oberon says, offering Dean a tiny smile and a nod. “He is already recovering—are you not, Samuel?”

Sam's shakes so seem to be changing in Dean’s arms. It isn't pain wracking his body any longer. It's just confusion, and excitement, and a heady mix of exuberant joy and pure energy, like sunlight on water.

And Dean knows exactly how his brother is feeling because ... because he can _feel_ Sam, not just pressed up close against his skin, but _everywhere_. Like Sam is air breathed into his lungs, filling him up and getting into his bloodstream. Like he's the sun beaming down and drenching Dean in warmth and a clean, golden glow.

It’s enough to make Dean dizzy, and now it’s his turn to sway and Sam’s to catch. Oberon’s laughter fills the clearing, rich and joyous.

“Too much for you, little consort?” the High King asks, his voice gently teasing.

It _is_ too much—it's too bewilderingly perfect and whole, when Dean thought he’d never feel complete again. Never feel like he belonged anywhere. But he belongs here now. He belongs in Sam’s arms, at Sam’s side, and the homecoming is staggering.

“Dean.” Sam’s voice sounds funny, but it only takes a quick peek inside himself for Dean to understand that his brother is just feeling as confused and nervous and exhilarated as Dean is himself. “What just happened?”

“I told you,” Oberon interrupts before Dean can even begin to guess. “I could not allow a human to own one of the Fae. Especially not one as strong and lovely as your consort. This, however, I find very suitable. I haven’t had a Lord of the Hunt in centuries. Never two.”

The High King sounds inordinately pleased with himself—jovial bordering on smug. Sam still doesn’t quite understand, Dean can tell, but that’s all right because Dean thinks he has an idea. When he lifts his face to his brother’s and opens eyes he hadn't realized he closed, he isn’t surprised by the sight of Sam glowing in the sunlight: Sam’s hair gone auburn with pure gold and crimson highlights, and his eyes a rich, autumn brown.

“Dean, your wings,” Sam murmurs, reaching, and Dean shifts them one final time, feels his body growing heavier and more substantial as bits and pieces melt and fade into the air. The transformation doesn’t hurt the way it did before, at the hands of the dwarves and the lorelai: is no worse than having his hair clipped.

Behind him, Keelan makes some sort of broken noise that Dean ignores in favor of reaching up to brush his hand through his brother’s—his lord’s—hair.

If Sam notices when Dean’s fingers run over the tiny nub of one of the horns rising from his brow, then he doesn’t give any sign of it, inside or out. Dean’s smile widens and he lets his hand drop back down to his side.

He’ll let Sam find them for himself later.


	30. Breath

“Remember, love,” Keelan advises. “Softness.”

The words curl into Dean's mouth with his next shaky inhalation of breath to lie thick and sour on his tongue. He swallows, trying to get rid of the taste, and only succeeds in curdling his already unsettled stomach. With a grimace, he squeezes his eyes shut and turns his face to the side—trying to go away, to distance himself from what's coming.

Keelan grips his chin and draws his face back to the center. “No. Watch me, Uaithne.”

“Please—” Dean blurts, and then bites back the rest of the begging plea. Keelan never listens anyway. Dean has been here long enough now to know that. “Why are you doing this to me?” he whispers instead.

“Open your eyes and I’ll tell you.”

Dean doesn’t want to look—he doesn’t want to _see_ —but Keelan’s commands aren’t ever put off for long and so he clenches his jaw and cracks his eyelids cautiously.

Nothing has changed. He’s on his back in a soft, oversized bed in a stone room with flowers and tapestries on the walls. He's naked, just like usual, with his legs spread in order to accommodate Keelan’s slender body and give the king room to maneuver.

Keelan’s hands are resting lightly on top of Dean's thighs, but once he sees that he has Dean’s attention, he carefully strokes inward. Dean’s leg muscles quiver with the urge to clench together, barring access, but he has learned that lesson, at least. If he doesn’t want that drugged nectar poured down his throat, then he’ll stay as Keelan tells him.

Dean hasn’t been able to manage that yet—can't control his reactions well enough to get through a savoring without the nectar—and he’s all too aware of it waiting on the nightstand to his left. He hates the way he feels with the drug running through his veins, all warm and hyper sensitive. He hates the way it leaves him unable to do anything but cry noiselessly afterward, when Keelan holds him close and nuzzles lazily at the nape of his neck.

“I pleasure you because I fell in love with you, Uaithne,” Keelan says, trailing both hands up the inside of Dean’s thighs. One hand stops short to cup his sacs, the other continues up and begins to caress his manhood. Dean's breath comes faster as he feels himself start to respond.

“It’s a hard, terrible thing for a king of Faerie to love,” Keelan continues. “Especially when the beloved is a fragile mortal and can so easily be hurt or lost.”

Leaning forward, he presses a light kiss to the tip of Dean’s manhood, making it twitch and leak. Dean doesn't understand how something can feel at the same instant both so horrible and so wonderful, and his breath catches on a reluctant groan as Keelan continues to caress the intimate, private places of his body. When the tip of the king's finger rubs over the place they'll soon be joined, one of Dean's legs gives an involuntary inward jerk. The look Keelan gives him at the movement hovers somewhere between disappointed and disapproving, and Dean knows that the king is considering the drugged nectar.

After a brief inner struggle, he manages to spread his legs again—wider, this time, in an attempt to make up for his disobedience. The corners of Keelan's mouth lift in an appeased smile, and he makes a pleased noise, putting his hands back between Dean's legs.

"It's so very easy to love you," he whispers, rubbing his thumb against Dean's sacs.

“This isn’t love,” Dean can't quite stop himself from rasping.

He's immediately worried about upsetting Keelan, but the king is apparently in a forgiving mood because he only tilts his head to the side while encircling Dean's manhood with one hand. The firm touch sends an unwelcome twinge of pleasure through his groin and he bites his lip.

“It is,” Keelan asserts as he continues to pet Dean. “One day soon you will see that, my beloved Uaithne.”

“That isn’t my name,” Dean protests yet again, growing more confident in the face of Keelan's good humor—and more desperate in the face of the uncomfortable, twisting pit his stomach has become. “You’ve got the wrong guy, ple—”

“Hush now,” Keelan scolds gently. “Hush and let the pleasure take you.”

Dean doesn’t have any choice but to obey—his body is being played too expertly by the king's slender hands—and it’s only a few moments before an alarming, exhilarating warmth rushes through his body, moving up from his feet to make his heart pound and his head whirl. He turns his face away again, hiding it shamefully against the pillow as his manhood spurts his pleasure out onto his upper thighs and Keelan’s talented hands, and this time Keelan permits it.

After, Keelan continues to hold him. He lightly strokes Dean’s softening length with wet fingers, teasing the sensitive flesh while cupping the aching sacs below with his opposite hand.

When Dean finally dares a glance, Keelan says, “You're rapturous when the pleasure takes you, love.”

Dean’s cheeks flare even hotter at the compliment. It feels like there are eels in his stomach, slipping and sliding all over one another and making him sick.

“And you enjoy the feeling, yes?”

“Y-yes,” Dean agrees. It's the answer Keelan wants and it's even the truth, sort of. Those few seconds of rush aren't so bad. It's all of the moments before and after Dean doesn't care for.

Keelan gives Dean a fond smile at the admission, finally releasing his manhood and sacs. Dean isn’t sure that the king’s new position—both hands on his inner thighs, easing his legs further apart—is any better, though.

“I’m going to savor you now, love,” Keelan announces. “And it will be just as pleasurable as it was the last time, and the time before that. All I expect you to do is stay still. I want you to let me pleasure you. Can you do that for me?”

“I try to,” Dean says, trying to force his heart rate to slow. “I just—I don’t want this—”

Keelan laughs. “You will, Uaithne, once you have accepted that you belong here with me.”

Dean means to deny it, but Keelan is already pressing inside of him—deep and full—and it’s all he can do not to strike out at the king. He bites his lip hard enough to taste blood, thighs trembling, and fights to stay still.

“Good,” Keelan says in a tight, strained voice. “That’s good, just be still. I’m almost there, love.”

Dean whimpers far in the back of his throat and then twitches as he feels the push of Keelan’s sac against his own buttocks. Keelan’s hand is on his side immediately, stroking up and down.

“Shh,” Keelan murmurs. “You’re doing wonderfully, love. Just take deep breaths and focus on how good you feel.”

Dean tries, taking a shuddering breath and then letting it out on a slow exhalation. He makes it through four repetitions before Keelan begins to move inside of him, and then, with a helpless gasp, he’s crying. He’s crying, but he still isn’t moving, and this is further than they’ve ever gotten before. If he were going to panic and begin to thrash, he would have before now. Which means he won’t need the nectar, which is a good thing.

So why does his progress make his stomach shrivel even further?

“So beautiful,” Keelan croons, kissing each of Dean’s cheeks before claiming his mouth in a slow, sweet kiss. It feels like forever before he lifts his head again, and then it's only long enough to praise, “So good for me.”

Then he's back, lavishing attention on Dean's jaw and throat while pushing his hands between Dean’s buttocks and the bed. Tilting Dean's hips up, he moves their bodies together in a steadily increasing rhythm.

Dean squeezes his eyes shut against the sting of fresh tears, concentrates on the tiny sparks of pleasure, and breathes.


End file.
